Newspapers please link to your sources
20 August 2008
The pop singer Lily Allen wrote a piece on her blog saying that she had finished her anticipated second album called Stuck On The Naughty Step but her record company had not yet released it, perhaps because the people supposed to be doing that had been laid off.
For this post, it does not matter if you like Lily Allen or not, but in the last paragraph, I linked to the Lily Allen's blogpost, look did it again! Not hard was it?
Well three of four of Britain's major national broadsheet papers quoted from the above blog post, the Times, Guardian and Telegraph, All three of them failed to link to their source. The Metro, the paper they put on buses and trains, did not do any better.
Only the tax funded BBC managed to link to Allen's site. However, the link is across in the right column, and does not link directly to the blog post.
I know by the standards of newspapers that the hyperlink is cutting edge technology, being invented only in 1965 by Project Xandu and first used on the World Wide Web in 1991 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
The journalists presumably had the blog they were cutting and pasting from in front of them while writing, would it have been that much more effort to cut and paste the URL into the post?
On most browsers, you can copy the URL with these three shortcuts: Ctrl+L, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C
Unless you are on the Mac, then you want: Cmd+L, Cmd+A, Cmd+C
Hyperlinks are what turns text into hypertext, there is a clue in every link: http://, the HTTP stands for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol. It is not PTDP the "Plain Text Deadend Protocol", it is not NWHTHTCNLP, the "Now We Have Them Here They Can Never Leave Protocol".
Linking to what are you talking about is how the Web works, like taking your trolley back to the trolley rack is how supermarkets work. Throwing your trolley into a ditch or leaving it in the middle of the road ruins the ecosystem. It is also rather inconvenient for the other shoppers who find there are no trolleys anymore.
Likewise, withholding the sources to keep your readers in the dark is disrespecting the ecology of the Web. Again the key is in the name "Web", interconnected sites, it is the World Wide Web, not 'My Little Cul-de-sac'.
1 Garrick says...
Here here!
Posted at 1:15 p.m. on August 20, 2008
2 Sean says...
That was good. I'm crackin' up.
Posted at 2:26 p.m. on August 20, 2008
3 akahn says...
Control-L usually selects the whole address, so only Control-L Control-C would be needed.
Posted at 2:48 p.m. on August 20, 2008
4 John Reese says...
They're carts, not "trolleys"! ;)
Posted at 3:22 p.m. on August 20, 2008
5 Zeth says...
Thanks for your comments guys, the newspapers need to sit a while on the naughty step until they are willing to play nicely.
John Reese, thanks for visiting, it is nice to see a colonist who has mastered reading and writing ;)
Posted at 7:37 p.m. on August 21, 2008