13 Comments Add your own

• 1. discreet_chaos  |  November 26th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

  (I’m not sure if the spamfilter ate my previous comment or if it got lost in the ether. Anyway, I actually put the wrong url in the textbox, so at least this one would be right)

  I’d venture that the NYTimes may have a policy about linking to blogs, rather than outside sites.

  If you click my name, you’ll find one of Brian Stelter’s NYTimes “TVDecoder” entries which addressed the way the strike would affect many popular shows.

  All of the source links in that post point toward mainstream media sources and if you click the one beside “24″, you’re taken to a mainsite article, also written by Brian, which links to a grid from the LATimes.

  So, though I may be mistaken, I have to assume that the lack of a link in the Nikki Finke article is more reflective of the Times questioning the reliability of blogs, rather than a blanket policy against all outside links.

  (I apologize if this is a dupe. I don’t know what happened)

• 2. discreet_chaos  |  November 27th, 2007 at 12:07 am

  Whoops! I should’ve clicked and actually verified my assumptions before commenting (twice)

  I now see that the “24″ article isn’t to a mainsite article, but to another “TVDecoder” post. (I could’ve sworn it was a mainsite article when I first read it, a couple of weeks ago, but I’m probably wrong) Anyway… So, my whole theory about the “reliability” of blogs has gone out the window, but any way you look at it, we can at least see that the Times might have a different linking policy for their in-house blogs, if nothing else.

  (Sorry about my confusion. I just got out of a loooong meeting and obviously didn’t think)

• 3. Rob  |  November 27th, 2007 at 12:27 am

  Many news sites are still hoping you’ll ignore other news sites and click the link to ‘Make us your homepage.’

  They’re focused so much on beating the competition and holding their content close to their vests they lose site of the reason why they exist: The consumer and their wants and needs.

• 4. Jason  |  November 27th, 2007 at 6:53 am

  I think part of it with TV sites is that web producers re-writing reporter stories don’t take the time to go and find links and code them in. And most reporters don’t know how to code their web scripts to link.

  We typically include links in an outside column next to our stories (Related Links). Click my name to read a recent story I did on Minnesotans using YouTube: I coded the links right into the body of the story.

  It always drives me nuts when the local newspaper writes a story about a web page or web venture and doesn’t link it.

• 5. steve Garfield  |  November 27th, 2007 at 8:34 am

  You got that right. It’s a long standing problem with the Boston Globe. In articles about YouTube they almost never link to the videos they are writing about. I usually do it for them in a blog post.

• 6. Terry Heaton  |  November 27th, 2007 at 8:51 am

  The New York Times builds dynamic pages on subjects, topics and people it covers, and its CMS automatically codes the links in the stories. It does this not only to generate page view opportunities, but also to raise its Google juice in the same way that Wikipedia does. If your site doesn’t do this, your handshake with the Web is only partial.

  That said, I fully agree with Cory that outside links would be nice. However, a link FROM the Times carries enormous weight in the handshake process, and they likely figure there’s no quid pro quo. Lame.

• 7. Gorman  |  November 27th, 2007 at 9:08 am

  Lame indeed. It shouldn’t be about the quid pro quo. They shouldn’t care about the traffic coming back from the places to which they link, it’ll rarely be worth it. As long as you keep the users that came to your site in the first place a better experience, in this case better informed, that should matter more.

  One of the few things I love about Wikipedia is that you have tons of cross-linking throughout an article. Normally I’ll find myself wandering through several pages, but when I come to a dead end, I always pop back to the page from which I started to wander.

  I’d have to agree with Jason, but in markets with smaller web staffs, it’s less about “making” the time than it is “having” the time to do it.

• 8. Rick Ellis  |  November 27th, 2007 at 9:23 am

  While I agree that the Times piece would benefit from actually linking to the site it’s discussing, not linking to other sites perceived as competiton is not unusual. For that matter, Nikki’s site generally doesn’t seem to link to sites she might consider competition.

  In the end, it’s a business decision, albeit a dumb one.

• 9. Bill Gorman  |  November 27th, 2007 at 9:33 am

  I think it may be a distinction [meaningless on the web] between news articles and blog posts.

  Brian Stelter has linked to our blog from his TVDecoder blog posts at NYT, but perhaps that is verboten from news “articles”.

• 10. David Johnson  |  November 27th, 2007 at 10:11 am

  Terry has it all down in spades, as usual.

• 11. David Johnson  |  November 27th, 2007 at 10:33 am

  but… i think there is a potentially blurry line in associative or inline linking from article text to sites where a certain level of endorsement could be implied. or at least editors are thinking about that, which may be a good thing.

  indeed, once you get beyond the image-oriented value of branding exposure, online advertising conversion is pretty much about driving traffic to sites via clickthroughs.

  if one applies the old pr-vs-ad print rules about one inch of news copy being worth 100 times (or some other similarly giant multiple) of the same inch of display advertising, how much is an inline, contextual link in article body copy worth compared to a text ad or banner ad.

  clearly, search engines like google value them highly, and for good reason. inline hyperlinking is the fundamental value proposition behind the initial creation of hypertext markup language. and prior to search engines, it was the only way to navigate the WWW if you didn’t get a direct URL via word of mouth. this seems to also be playing out where online branding and marketing folks are trying to get bloggers to give them some link juice.

  in a revenue-challenged environment, i can see many reasons why the new york times would consider not linking from story copy a sensible practice in protecting editorial integrity and advertising value at the same time… at least for now.

• 12. Scott Wyffels  |  November 27th, 2007 at 12:58 pm

  Yep, most traditional online news sites view users as depletable resources.

• 13. tdc  |  November 27th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

  #12 posts the most ironic comment as their “customers” do not even provide links to their other OWNED properties.

  sorry, scott.

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