CJR Daily can count on one hand the number of times that we have seen a newspaper, in an online version of a story, provide an Internet link to a story in another outlet.
So it was with some fascination that we found a live link in Maureen Dowd’s op-ed column in the New York Times today directing us to a story in a different Times — the one in Los Angeles.
We rang up the Times (of New York) to see if it had perhaps seen the light. (More on that later.) Because, for our money, the continuing refusal of news organizations to link to each other, or, in most cases, even to publicly available information upon which the story is based, wastes one of the best features of the Internet. Links allow readers to check information in stories for themselves, and are crucial for establishing credibility on the Web. And in the age of blogs, which are built around links, a piece on the Web without links simply comes across as arrogant, reeking of a “trust us, we’re experts” mentality.
True, papers (the New York Times included) often provide a link on company names in stories in their business sections; this usually sends you to another page within the paper’s site with stock quotes and other information about the company. But they rarely provide external links to news stories in news stories. Given that papers obviously know how to code URLs when they want to, that strikes us as just one more symptom of a self-defeating pride that keeps news organizations with one foot in the future but the other embedded in the past.
As for that Times spokesman (on a holiday week, we couldn’t find an actual Times editor with a search warrant), he insists that the paper began putting live links in op-ed columns about two years ago, and that “We link to external sites from news articles as well, though maybe not quite as regularly.”
Could have fooled us. Meantime, we’re not budging off our earlier request to Santa Claus: bring us a Web-friendlier press for Christmas.
–Bryan Keefer
Bryan Keefer was CJR Daily’s deputy managing editor.