My friend Pam Slim wrote a piece titled “Is This the Time to Chase a Career Dream?” for the New York Times.
These are the words the NYT LinkBot 9000 chose to link:
- United Parcel Service
- Grammy
- John Legend
- yoga
Note: These link to internal NYT “topics” pages. They do not link to @PamSlim or the Wikipedia entry for yoga.
Now here are words the article should have linked to but didn’t:
- Pam Slim’s blog
- Pam’s Twitter page
- Jonathan Fields (He’s a blogger and author. To mention a fellow blogger in a blog post without linking would be rude, but for newspaper sites it’s the norm.)
Why do newspaper websites use robots to clutter up their pages with useless links?
Part of it is attention hoarding. “Don’t touch that dial! We’ll be right back after a message from our sponsors!”
The other part is inertia. Journalists couldn’t link out in the days of print, why start now? Let the robots handle it.
This is bad for readers, bad for writers, and bad for newspapers.
Readers get articles cluttered up with useless links, so they learn not to click. Even worse, pages without links are just not fun. Readers love links sprinkled in blogs because sometimes they find a life-changing gem. When this happens readers trust the linking site more, and not only will they be loyal, they’ll tell their friends.
Freelance writers see that they get no link love, so why bother? It’s better for them to focus on their own blog where they can build relationships with readers and other bloggers.
It’s the worst for newspapers though because they’re missing what the web is all about. Every successful internet company has “linking to cool stuff” at its core. Google is the textbook case; they won not by hoarding attention but by being the most usable and trusted link repository. How valuable would Twitter be if you couldn’t tweet outbound links?
In my last post on newspapers I said paper is a big problem because paper entombs value while the internet multiplies it. It turns out that having a paper mindset is just as bad.
Special note to my friends that have worked on or written for newspaper sites: Do newspaper content management systems make linking hard? Is it that editors just don’t want to deal with links? Are they worried about link rot?