Something odd about the Wurzelbacher story was that the hyperlinks didn’t go in new directions. No one linked to articles about the way the plumbing profession works, or the struggles small businessmen face. Indeed, with surprising regularity, the hyperlinks were circuitous, returning again to the big articles in the Washington Post, CNN, etc.

That’s just because these articles were the most easily accessible. Everyone knows how to navigate the New York Times Web site; why mess around trying to find out what the Cincinnati Enquirer has to say? The problem was that the articles by major news sources still weren’t that great. Joe the Plumber and the corporate media hyperlink strategy demonstrated that if journalists don’t really know anything, they can’t link their way around the problem. If a writer doesn’t understand an issue he’s writing about, linking to other articles about that issue won’t fix the article.



After lunch, I visited The New York Times, where the headline in the middle of that day (at the same time that oil had fallen below seventy dollars a barrel for the first time in sixteen months) was “Joe the plumber is under scrutiny.” (The news priority here was kind of embarrassing. But whatever, when in Rome.) I decided to follow every link in the article.

The article linked to another Times piece about the specific exchange between Wurzelbacher and Obama (basically the transcript of the YouTube video). Another link sent me to the Toledo Blade and the original story of Joe the Plumber, called “Obama supports U.S. aid for banks; he says relief plan needs regulations.” Another hyperlink led to a story from October 12 about Obama’s Ohio campaign; another led to a Fox News article, which wondered if “maybe the plumbers union will reconsider their [sic] endorsement of Obama.” This article linked to the Web site of United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada, one of the few sites I saw that day with no reference to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio.

I had evolved my strategy so to just follow the link chain in a single article, rather than use links to actually become informed. Admittedly, these hyperlinks were sort of interesting (the name of the plumbers’ union is almost twenty words long. Who knew?). But they still weren’t terribly informative. My original goal was to learn all I could about Joe the Plumber but, despite copious linking, there really wasn’t anything to learn here—or anywhere.

The Times had a page with information about everything with regard to the McCain campaign. There was a similar link to Barack Obama’s campaign, but I followed McCain for a minute. There was basic biographical information, links to all NYT articles about him, a link to his Almanac of American Politics entry (requiring login: dead-end). The TimesMcCain page also had a link to John McCain’s Facebook page, in which McCain reported that his favorite TV shows are 24 (duh) and Seinfeld (really?). Obama lists his favorite show as SportsCenter, which seems like sort of a cop-out. Back to McCain news, I saw a link to 2006 Time magazine article about the McCain family, “The McCains and War: Like father, like son.” This linked to another Time article about “grading the final presidential debate.”

Sigh. I now understood how Huffington Post works. I’d always wondered why the site features three-inch headlines and lots of links to celebrity gossip. Now I know; reading nothing but news—alot of news—is boring.



By the end of the day, I realized that different news organizations follow different hyperlink strategies. There’s the HuffPo “mullet strategy” of news presentation (business up front, party in the back). HuffPo looks clean but then links to other places with user-generated content and unverifiable assertions. It lets the reader do the heavy lifting and determine accuracy, sorting the valid from the invalid. This strategy keeps readers entertained—but it also distracts readers, and can lead them to unreliable information.

Corporate media hyperlinks—found at places like the Times, Fox News, Time, CNN, and MSNBC—mostly direct the reader to other pages within the site. This keeps readers with the same news source, but has the disadvantage of potentially boring the reader. MSNBC was a major violator here, with hyperlinks to its dreary “fact-check” page.

While I haven’t heard much discussion about news organizations’ “hyperlink policies,” it’s clear that hyperlinking is a strategic decision. The circuitous link strategy makes sense if your publication is really worried about people getting distracted or if your publication really has the best content (it does happen). But with links you do want to distract people a little, because it somehow makes the publication seem current and interesting. You want to let the reader explore a little.

As Jenny Lyn Bader explained in a Times article back in 2000:

In the old-media world, the question was how to get the audience to stay with you. In the new-media world, it is how to get the audience to leave and come back again. After all, it is not readability that makes for greatness on the Web: it is clickability.

Call it the Miracle on 34th Street strategy: the goal of sending visitors away from your site is, ultimately, to keep them coming back.