Why Are We Still Talking About Outbound Link Scarcity?
Frank Rich has been a New York Times columnist for at least five years. Scott Rosenberg recently twittered about a post by Edward J. Delaney, in which Delaney interviews Rich about a practice that sets Rich apart from nearly all of the other Times columnists: he includes hyperlinks in his work.
Adding links, he says, “came about very informally…I’d say the biggest single breakthrough was to realize, as my assistant Benjamin Toff realized, we have the capability to insert links into the pieces easily, electronically…without going through the bureaucracy. If every link had to go through a bureaucratic procedure that was time-consuming on deadline, we couldn’t do it.
As Scott notes, it’s shocking that, 15 years into the web’s popular existence, we’re still talking about this issue. Rich says that “columnists at The Times are free agents”, and yet hardly any of them link to other stuff. Bizarre, eh?
There is hope, however. Mathew Ingram points out that the New York Times has started linking to third-party sources from its front page.
Both Delaney and Ingram reference smart media thinker Scott Karp, citing two articles on the value of outbound links.
