Intelligence you can count on

A reader posed the following question in response to our previous post on enhancing FPinfomart content:

“As a throw-back to the first article in this series, I’m interested in learning more about which content is included in Infomart. For example, Infomart offers the National Post as a source, but not all articles from the National Post are in the database. Can you tell me what the criteria is for whether articles are included? Does it always have to do with copyright? Is there any way that an Infomart user can determine whether articles from a subscribed source are missing?”

This is a great question, and definitely merits its own post.  And, the answer, like many other things is (unfortunately), “it depends.”

There are 4 basic reasons why an article that was published in a newspaper would not be available on FPinfomart:

1. The author is a freelancer (i.e. not employed directly by the newspaper or publication in which his/her work is published), and has not authorized the publisher to distribute the work in any other medium than the original printed format.

2. The story is republished from a 3rd party source (usually a newswire, such as Reuters, Canadian Press, Associated Press, etc.) who has authorized the newspaper to publish their copy in print, but not to distribute the work in any other medium.

3.  The story has been retracted or suppressed (usually for legal reasons) after publication.

4.  The article was actually paid content, such as an ad supplement, an advertorial, “special section,” Appointment Notice, etc.  In the majority of cases, FPinfomart does not carry such paid content, as a 3rd party has paid the publisher to run it, and therefore it does not carry through to a database such as ours.

The part of this answer that is a bit fuzzy is exactly what happens when an article meets one of the criteria above.

For content that is owned or enhanced by Canwest, we actually add ALL content (with the exception of that belonging to type 4, above) to our database.  We keep a “blacklist” of content that is not allowed to be distributed by FPinfomart for the reasons specified above (specific bylines; original sources, articles that have been retracted, etc).  When displaying a list of results to you, we check all articles against this “blacklist,” and if any meet the criteria for suppression, we display this message to you:

The advantage here, of course, is that even though you can’t read the text, you at least know the article appeared, when, and the citation details.

For content that we receive in database form from other publishers (the hundreds of sources we do not enhance ourselves), we are not able to do this, because the publisher removes the articles (also using the criteria stated above) BEFORE they send us the content.   Therefore, we never receive the restricted articles, and cannot provide even citations for them.  We are not provided with a list of suppressed content, and therefore it is as invisible to us as it is to you.

Thank you, Michelle, for submitting your question.  I’m sure there were a lot of other FPinfomart users wondering the same thing.  I hope this explanation provides the answer you were looking for.

More questions about how FPinfomart works?  Let us know in the comments.  You may inspire our next post!