January 20, 2011
How missing links hurt online news, part 1
For nearly 15 years, the internet has been popular with the general public. So it amazes me that so many online news stories still routinely lack the kind of links that online and mobile users find helpful—and that also enhance the transparency, credibility, and shareability of news. In a blog post this week, the Google-newsroom conspiracy theory Kevin Sablan of the Orange County Register nailed exactly how bad missing obvious links make news organizations look…
By Amy Gahran
Sablan wrote:
“Search engines must be paying newsrooms to send them traffic. Okay, I’m sure that’s not true—but it feels like it is true when I read articles published by media companies online. Every day, I run into stories that might as well include these promotional bullet points:
His list continued quite a bit further, ending with: “My gosh, this list can go on forever!”
Over the last decade, including very recently, I’ve spoken to people at news organizations about why so many online news stories often miss obvious opportunities to link.
The good news is that, based on my totally unscientific sample, the once-common strategic error of attempting to trap visitors on your site (by denying them easy or tempting exits via links) appears to be nearly dead.
The bad news is that too many news orgs still cling to other excuses for skipping links. The top excuses I hear are:
- Our content management system makes it difficult or impossible for reporters to insert links into stories.
- It’s too much extra work/time to add links.
- It’s not my job. Someone else adds links, right?
- Links are distracting to readers.
- If we link to something, people will assume we’re endorsing it.
- We don’t have any clear policies on which kinds of links to add or not add.
- Links belong only at the end of the story.
- We do link! Just only to our own related coverage.
- Wire service copy doesn’t have links.
- I hate change. Don’t ask me to do anything new/different.
...Ok, I’ve never actually heard a mainstream news reporter or editor utter the last excuse out loud, but that attitude is pretty obvious disturbingly often.
If any of the excuses on this list apply to you or to your news organization, then consider this: the web is about links. Web users expect links. Links give people a reason to become, and stay, interested in the topics and events covered by your news.
When your stories fail to provide direct, specific links to source materials and other relevant or useful content, you actively tarnish the perception of your news brand. Here’s how:
- News organizations generally hope to appear clued-in—but missing links in stories look clueless about online culture.
- News organizations hope to appear useful—but missing links just force your most interested audience members to finish your job for you.
- News organizations, journalists, and editors often publicly champion transparency—but absent links can appear ambiguous or obfuscatory in a “just trust us” kind of way, thus breeding suspicion and undermining credibility.
What can you do to improve this situation?
Make it a habit to save the URLs of source documents while you’re reporting. Make it easy on yourself: set up a free account with a social bookmarking service like Diigo.com and install its bookmarklet, toolbar, or browser plug-in in your primary web browser.
Then, when you’re on a page with information you might use in your story, it’s just a single click to bring up a form where you can save information about that page—including notes, highlights, tags, and more. You can make this information private if you want, but at least you won’t lose track of your source pages or story leads. Now you won’t have any excuse not to link directly to the most relevant page. (No more general links in stories about specific energy news issues pointing to Energy.gov, please!)
Next, try to include at least two external links in every story. Don’t go overboard—30 links in a story is probably too much. But just get familiar and comfortable with the process. Get used to how they look in your story. If your content management system or editorial process makes including the links cumbersome, lobby loudly for change. This is a matter of helping your news org not look clueless or careless.
The problem of missing links gets considerably worse when you consider that, in the next couple of years, mobile devices will become the most popular way that people in the US will access the internet. For mobile users, missing or non-specific links (especially in mobile alerts via text messaging, e-mail, and social media) don’t just create a bad impression. They become a genuine obstacle to access, engagement, and sharing.
I’ll discuss special mobile user considerations for links in my post next week.
Comments
Thank you for this excellent post. It will be required reading for everyone in our newsroom.
By Matt DeRienzo, 01/21/11 at 10:26 am
Thank you for your experience. Good to know
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By asea travel, 01/21/11 at 9:02 pm
Interesting take on “missing links”. I don’t think the “links” are missing; but rather, the content or articles that readers want to see is missing. One option is to link the customer to where the content is—another site. However, the publishing world is about customer acquisition and monetizing audience so send folks to other sites can be counter intuitive and/or counter productive. Another option (which does not exist yet but is emerging) is to move the content to the consumer rather than the consumer to the content. Digital curation platforms will soon allow editors to easily and legally move the articles or content their consumers/readers want right to their own site. Links are what the net is about today just like gopher and FTP were what the net was about 20 years ago. Things change…. Gregg Freishtat (full disclosure - CEO of Vertical Acuity where we are (un)Googling the Web.
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