Monday, January 02, 2006
MSM Don't Link
...and we think she should.
Jane Hamsher at firedoglake is 100% right:
If there was one thing I would say to print journalists trying to ease themselves into the internet era it would be LEARN HOW TO LINK YOU BASTARDS.
It drives us CRAZY and fuels much scorn when nobody in the MSM seems to realize that this possibility (let alone this necessity) exists. And I don't mean some auto-generated Yahoo link to the word "Pentagon" like nobody knows what it means. I mean if you talk about Karl Rove's first appearance before the grand jury, and six months ago your own publication wrote an article about that very event, you link to it. It's not hard, you probably looked at it when you wrote the piece in the first place.
How hard would it be to - say - give a link to the Committee on Indian Affairs so that readers can get a look at Jack Abramoff's silly e-mails when you report about them?
The Washington Post site does a much better job than just about anywhere else...and I've a feeling that they'll get even better. But The New York Times and - especially the UK press - have a lot of catching up to do. Not sure how this would work with the Associated Press, Reuters, Knight-Ridder, etc., though...and that's a problem...though I also think it's a problem that so many stories are left to just the wire service reports.
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