About 10 years ago, when I was at The New Yorker, I worked on launching the redesign, paywall, and the move to WordPress. We actually had most of the archive technically ready to go. The data wasn’t the hard part.

The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.

That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.

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rconti 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Any idea what changed, if anything? Court decisions made in the meantime simplifying things?

Hopefully the content fits in a few buckets (cartoons, fiction, non-fiction) as far as different terms for rights might go. And then from there, you can lop off anything that's past its copyright term (?). Then maybe the next step is grouping works by the agent/publisher, if any? Or maybe all the contracts with the New Yorker are signed by individuals, with the New Yorker as a publisher. I don't know.

	▲	donohoe 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I assume it was a matter of time - ten years of digging into contracts or chasing people/agencies down (speculative on my part)? Bear in mind, if you are unsure if you have rights to a piece then you cannot use it until you know for sure - I am sure that was part of it too.

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donohoe 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fun (unrelated) fact:

My favorite product that I got to build there was “Cartoons at Random”. You’ll never guess what it did/was!

I miss it terribly, just swiping images off a stack to reveal a new random cartoon underneath.

The developer (Justin?) did an amazing interaction on iOS app (seamless, no jank) and web version was decent too.

They broke it when they migrated from Wordpress to their own Condé Nast CMS

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/random/share/1544311

Such delight. Sigh.

	▲	taveras 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm bummed that we never made that link keep working - it was a fun start page.