Over at Kos today, the estimable Kagro X wonders aloud why traditional online news outlets so often link to archived material embedded within their own sites---which may or may not be necessarily relevant to the story you're reading---rather than to, say, more relevant outside source material:
Seriously. Which system better informs a readership? Links to archives that in all likelihood have nothing whatsoever to do with the current story? Or links to source material that can put you in the frame of mind of the reporter?
For the readership, of course the question answers itself. For mainstream news-sites such as nytimes.com, however, it isn't about informing the readership. It is all about the money, simple as that.
In the world of corporate Web media such as nytimes.com, it's the Webmaster's primary responsibility to keep you engaged on the site, scrolling through and clicking on as many pages within the site, for as long as humanly possible. Every time you click on a link that takes you to yet another page within nytimes.com, you are giving the site another "visit," and the number of visits that the site registers per day, per week, and per month in turn governs the rates that organizations such as nytimes.com charge to online advertisers. More visits = higher advertising rates. It's also the reason why more lengthy news and feature stories are broken down into four-, five- or six-page segments, each of which is tallied as another visit. And yes, you do view more ad content every time you click on a new page at nytimes.com, but what they really want are the multiple hits. Like Nielsen viewer share for TV and circulation rate base for magazines, visits and hits are the bread and butter of corporate Webdom. You may be reading an online newspaper, but it really ain't about the news at all.
But let's give out a shout to Frank Rich anyway, for his willingness to use his column to steer Web traffic away, when appropriate, from nytimes.com to other, more relevant, sources. One wonders how much longer senior management at The Times will let him get away with it.
---Vitelius
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