Ask HN: Why is there an internal email in source of an NYT article?

[jordonwii]

After reading the recent article on emotion-based targeting for NYT ads, I went looking through the source of a few articles and found this in the source code of [1]. Anyone seen this kind of thing before or know why this would happen?

<!-- ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Kingsbury, Katie <[e-mail]> Date: Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 2:30 PM Subject: Rollout To: Bennet, James <[e-mail]>

James,

Here’s a line up for the launch tomorrow, all of these will be online before Sunday:

    • A.G.’s publisher’s note about The Times
    • Manjoo on household items that track us
    • Wu on the history of privacy
    • Jeong on A.I. and insurance
    • Metzel on genetically engineered babies
    • Warzel on tech CEOs in their own words
    • Fr. Martin on privacy and faith
    • Emily Chang on privacy as a feminist issue
    • Douthat on our post-privacy order
    • Swisher on privacy regulation
    • Irby on what’s funny about all this.

Plus, of course, your piece if you can actually get it done in time.

Next week, we’ll drop the piece about how we turned a public camera in Manhattan into a facial recognition equipped surveillance machine and who we caught with it.

The vanity URL is locked in as nytimes.com/privacy-project and the social team has spun up the @PrivacyProject account.

Katie -->

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html

[chippy]

Looks like he actually got it done on time: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/privacy-project-l...

which also includes the commented email in the source.

Also relevant from the launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638568 "The NYT's fancy new 'Privacy Project' page is stuffed with tracking scripts"

[johnchristopher]

Looks like a fumble from an editor or author that used the CMS editing zone for writing and jotting notes and then forgot that HTML comments in the article are going to be published. The CMS should strip comments IMO.

[whalabi]

Just found this too

Pretty hilarious, not sure how it could happen by accident!

(I found this page for googling for some of the content of the email in quote marks)

[pndy]

> Fr. Martin on privacy and faith

> Emily Chang on privacy as a feminist issue

> Douthat on our post-privacy order

I have no words.

[ClassyJacket]

I don't know, that is strange. Did you notify Katie or James?