Jim Brady, former Washpost.com editor, summed up a lot in less than 140 characters on Twitter yesterday. Responding to the piece by a Washington Post reporter who felt ripped off by Gawker’s post about the reporter’s story, Brady wrote that he didn’t see the problem: “So, a few thousand people encountered something you wrote who might not have otherwise? Great!”
In other words, Gawker linked to the Post’s story, and drove traffic to it. Why complain about that?
But there are links and there are links, and the way Gawker does its linking seems somewhat cynical, designed more to keep readers at Gawker rather than enable readers to see the source they quote.
A good example is Gawker’s complimentary post Sunday about a courageous series in the St. Petersburg Times on the Church of Scientology. Gawker, appropriately, credited the Times up high for its reporting, and noted that the paper’s most recent article helped confirm some of the most troubling allegations raised in its previous stories.
Gawker’s post is a relatively long one—I had to scroll down five times on my monitor. And it’s filled with links. But, oh, look where those links go:
First screen: Two links, one to Gawker’s tag to posts about the St. Petersburg Times, the second a link to Gawker’s post about an earlier St. Petersburg Times story.
Second screen: Two links, one to an earlier Gawker post about John Travolta, the other is again to Gawker’s post about a St. Petersburg Times story.
Third screen: One link, this one to Gawker’s post about Tom Cruise.
Fourth screen: Two links, one to a post from Deadspin.com, (a sister site with Gawker), and finally, a link to a story from the St. Petersburg Times.
Fifth screen: A final link, this one also to the St. Petersburg Times.
In other words, Gawker does link to the original source, and presumably does drive some traffic. But it provides just two links out of eight to the Times, and those two wind up at the end of the post.
I know from my own study of Web usage at WSJ.com that traffic from links falls off dramatically—as much as 95 percent—after a reader scrolls down two or more screens. That why Yahoo’s new home page occupies a mere screen-and-a-half. So by putting links to Gawker up high and links to the Times at the end, the blog is greatly reducing the amount of traffic that would go to the original source.
Keep in mind, this isn’t like that Washington Post feature that started the discussion. That was a fine piece, but one that, as the reporter himself acknowledges, isn’t going to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The St. Petersburg Times’s coverage of Scientology, though, is a noble example of a journalistic organization doing stellar and gutsy work, with the full understanding that lawsuits, or worse, could ensue.
I’m not arguing Gawker shouldn’t have blogged the story, or shouldn’t have excerpted parts of it. Given the extent of St. Petersburg’s coverage, Gawker’s excerpts seem to fall within Fair Use rules. But the Times ought to get more visible and more prominent links. The paper’s reporters and editors deserve not just credit but traffic, and a more upfront linking procedure would help ensure they get it.
it's called good business, you idiot!
Posted by Dawn Bridges on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 03:39 PM
Amen, Bill.
Posted by Jim Naughton on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 03:48 PM
The links that link back to gawker are usually automatically generated topic links. Also, regular gawker readers - regular blog readers, for that matter - generally are used to the format by now that the original source is listed at the bottom of the post. So if they want to go check it out they know where to find it, and it's not a matter of people getting bored or not scrolling down to the link.
Posted by Rob Hembry on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 03:54 PM
@Dawn It's actually not good business because it doesn't do the Gawker readers any favours and they are the ones that count in this equation.
Posted by Caitlin Fitzsimmons on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 03:57 PM
"I’m not arguing Gawker shouldn’t have blogged the story,"
Nice piece. But please, I beg you: "blogged about the story." I'd even take "blogged on." But "blogged the story" is just painful.
Posted by BC on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 04:51 PM
This is rich. Tell us, Bill, how many outbound links the typical WSJ.com article carried during your six years running the site?
Zero, I would guess is the median. I was flattered when the WSJ credited a post I wrote at Gawker; it never occured to me you might have linked us, because you simply linked to no one. See here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121263155989647245.html
Hypocrisy, no?
Posted by Ryan Tate on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 05:36 PM
To me, I find Engadget's way of linking to be more nefarious. That little "read" link in the bottom corner is almost impossible to find if you don't know it's there.
On my own blog, ShortFormBlog, which condenses information to the smallest nub possible, I take great pains to link to the original source to encourage readers to keep going and dig deeper. But there's no excuse to not link.
But on the other hand, this is no two-way street. Newspaper Web sites have famously been walled gardens about this sort of thing, and only recently have things like Sphere come up to keep the conversation going.
IMHO, everyone needs to link more and everyone needs to be more honest about their linking. Don't bury the lede, but don't bury the source either. It'll make this entire situation much easier to swallow.
Oh, and Ian Shapira's editor didn't do him any favors by making him angry about the whole situation, but it did reveal that Gawker to be a bit hypocritical in its approach.
Posted by Ernie Smith on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 05:46 PM
What you should really be complaining about is the Gawker (and Doctorow) habit of not even bothering to link to the item being discussed until the end of the piece, whereupon the link takes the form of an entire line [incorrectly coded in HTML most of the time, and, in extreme cases, just saying (link)].
The real issue is not knowing how to write hypertext. It is not the issue you have raised.
Posted by Joe Clark on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 05:46 PM
BC, I have to disagree with you. Blog = web log. You don't "log about" something, you "log it." So on that analogy, "blogged the story" is actually correct, if cruddy-sounding. (That said, when I hear Arianna Huffington refer to a blog post as "a blog," it kindles murder in my heart.)
Posted by Jeff Bercovici on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 05:55 PM
I wholeheartedly second everything Jeff just wrote. Yes, you can "blog a story." No, it doesn't sound good...but, then, we're talking about the word "blog," so there's really no lily to be gilded here.
And "a blog" to indicate "a blog post" is, yes, pretty much an omen of impending apocalypse.
Posted by Megan Garber on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 06:51 PM
I speak for myself when I say: the story is about how great the SPT reporting is. A link was - for those who read to the bottom of the story - there. As you said yourself, I make a very sincere point of naming them as the owners of this beat. The problem with the inverted pyramid taught at CJR is that it encourages readers to only scan the beginning of a story to get the news they "need." That's great for papers encouraging readers to get their news in blurbs - thus encouraging a minimal understanding of the news - but when our readers click on a post, they're gonna scan through the entire thing (or so the intent goes), and when they get to the bottom, they'll see my link (or so the intent goes). Glenn Greenwald more or less got the same treatment as the SPT; why isn't he kvetching? And why isn't the SPT making a fuss? Would love to hear what they have to say.
Posted by Foster Kamer on Tue 4 Aug 2009 at 12:38 PM
Except, Ryan, that in the piece you linked to, there is a link to Gawker, in the middle of the story, so I would guess that it's more than "zero".
Posted by Amy Araya on Tue 4 Aug 2009 at 01:05 PM
I, for one, would be fascinated to hear more about Mr. Grueskin's study on web usage. How many subjects were recruited? Did he test his page-scrolling thesis on multiple monitors and laptops? Was his page-scrolling finding uniformly true across all of the wsj.com's market segments, or did age and physical acuity of users play a role? Did he test only the home page for wsj.com or deeper pages, the ones where most folks arrive?
Posted by Cat Turner on Tue 4 Aug 2009 at 02:14 PM
Amy - you're mistaken I think. The story credits Gawker but does not link to them. It says, "News of Ms. Friedman's exit was earlier reported on Gawker.com Wednesday night." In this sentence, Gawker.com is not a live link and beyond that it references the home page, not the post in question. It's kind of like a footnote that cites the name of a publication, but not the article title or the date. Anyone who wants to go to the source is out of luck. So I have to agree with Ryan. Gawker's citations are perfectly adequate (similar to footnotes or endnotes) and given what Ryan pointed out (assuming it is indicative of a trend on WSJ.com during Bill's tenure), Bill's critique seems a bit... ironic.
Posted by MIke on Tue 4 Aug 2009 at 04:10 PM
while we're talking about standards here - can someone please define the unit of "screen" is for me? similar to handbreadth?
Posted by ryan on Tue 4 Aug 2009 at 04:20 PM
A few responses to the comments above:
To Dawn: Thanks for starting this discussion in such a thoughtful and constructive vein!
To those who see an irony in my CJR post and the WSJ’s practice during my time there: At WSJ.com, where I spent six of my last seven years at the Journal, bloggers and writers were expected to link freely and frequently to other sources of content. So, for example, MarketBeat linking to Barry Ritholtz here, and the Daily Fix linking to Deadspin here. Judging from this recent Law Blog post here, with the shout-out to Above the Law, it seems that practice is intact. I’m sure there are examples where this didn’t happen (I particularly remember some slowness in crediting paidcontent.org scoops), but our overall policy was to link prominently to the original source.
With print WSJ copy, it was more difficult. Part of the problem was cultural, as some journalists were reluctant to credit anyone (Web sites, newspapers or wire services) who scooped us. But we also were burdened with two kludgy content-management systems, one for print and one for online, that made it impossible to hide a URL in a print story and have it appear automatically in an online story. Thus, any URL had to be manually inserted into a story, and with hundreds of stories being published daily on deadline, it wasn’t a common practice. My understanding is that a new content management system is either in place or en route for the WSJ, one that will meld publication between print and online. Whether that will make a difference in this, I don’t know.
To Cat Turner, who asks about the source of my understanding involving traffic from Web pages, I don’t have the data, nor (since it’s proprietary) could I share it publicly if I did. But when we’d study traffic at WSJ.com, we could identify how many views to stories came from the home page, and learn how more traffic stories linked from the top screen got vs. those that appeared one, two or more screens below. Of course, this isn’t exactly a revolutionary theory about Web traffic. Those who want to know more can consult Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com, with interesting pages like this one.
Finally, to those who wonder if it’s proper to say we “blogged” a story (versus blogging on or about a story), I see both thefreedictionary.com and dictionary.com consider “blog” to be an intransitive verb (and Merriam Webster oddly provides only one definition, as a noun). So it looks like it’s not (yet) grammatically correct to say that. That said, I remember more than once a big story breaking in the newsroom and someone yelling out, “Blog that NOW!” I don’t remember anyone responding, “But ‘blog’ doesn’t take a direct object!”
Posted by Bill Grueskin on Wed 5 Aug 2009 at 11:51 AM