Where Papers’ Linking Problems Begin

Why aren’t news organizations better about linking? That question reverberates in digital-journalism circles periodically, and since the link is one of the more fundamental tenets of the web, if not the fundamental tenet, a failure to link is often portrayed as a symptom of an anti-digital culture.

Here, for instance, is Doc Searls on the topic: “Even now, in 2011, [mainstream media are] still trying to shove the Web’s genie back in the old ink bottle. They do it with paywalls, with schemes to drag your eyes past pages and pages of advertising, and (perhaps worst of all) by leaving out hyperlinks. Never mind that the hyperlink is a perfect way to practice one of journalism’s prime responsibilities: citing sources. … Maybe they take too seriously David Weinberger‘s “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” thesis (#7) in The Cluetrain Manifesto, and want to stay on (or crawl to the) top of whatever heaps they occupy.”

(Normally I would have dropped those links as extraneous, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea for this post.)

There’s some very interesting commentary on Searls’ post, with the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Boyer noting that his paper’s “workflows and CMSs are print-centric” — and others noting other CMS troubles with linking. That kicked off the latest round in this long-running discussion, a Twitter exchange featuring (among others) Mathew Ingram, C.W. Anderson, Jacob Harris and Patrick LaForge, the last two from the New York Times. The Twitter back-and-forth was captured by Ingram (and Politico’s Alex Byers) using Storify — see it here.

Ingram is tired of the workflow argument, contending on Twitter that “the fact this is STILL a workflow issue is almost worse than not caring.” Harris, for his part, tried to defend the Times, asking (at various points) if most readers care about links, and noting that “we aim to inform, but why does it matter when we link if Google is there and offers more choice to the reader?” (To be fair, Harris stated upfront that he was playing devil’s advocate.)

The last piece to consider is this discussion of workflow at Strange Attractor. Kevin Anderson, a veteran of the Guardian, notes the problems the Guardian endured going from Movable Type to a less-friendly content-management system, and a larger issue it faced: “There was an internal conflict over whether to use the web tools or the print tools to create content, and in the end, the print tools won out. The politics of print versus the web played out even in the tools we used to create content. That was an even more jarring move. It was like trying to create a web story with movable type, and I’m not talking about the blogging platform. Most newspaper CMSes are more WordPerfect from the 1980s than WordPress.”

This hearkens back to something Boyer said in commenting on Searls’s post, which Anderson also quoted: “In our newsroom, a reporter writes in Microsoft Word that’s got some fancy hooks to a publishing workflow. It goes to an editor, then copy, etc., and finally to the pagination system for flowing into the paper. Only after that process is complete does a web producer see the content. They’ve got so many things to wrangle that it would be unfair to expect the producer to read and grok each and every story published to the web to add links. When I got here a couple years ago, a fresh-faced web native, I assumed many of the similar ideas proposed above. ‘Why don’t they link?? It’s so *easy* to link!’ I’m not saying this isn’t broken. It is terribly broken, but it’s the way things are. Until newspapers adopt web-first systems, we’re stuck.”

Bingo — except the solution depends on what you mean when you say “systems.”

I spent more than 12 years as a columnist, editor and cat-herder at The Wall Street Journal Online, during which time I was the editorial guy on numerous enhancements to our editing-and-publishing tools, culminating in a project to replace those tools entirely. We opted to replace our systems with editing-and-publishing tools from EidosMedia, where I worked after the Journal and I parted ways — and where I got to see a number of other newsrooms’ workflows. (Disclosure: I’m still an EidosMedia consultant, and they sponsor this blog.)

Having seen this issue from a couple of different perspectives, I think at this point it’s much more a people problem than it is a systems problem. I keep thinking back to a conversation I had with a reporter for the print Journal, when I was still there and we were pondering how to replace our editing-and-publishing tools, and how that would change our workflows and newsroom hierarchy.

We were down in the nitty-gritty, discussing the various content fields we’d ask reporters to enter when they filed stories. The print reporter was adamant that those should be stripped to the minimum — the text of the story, essentially. I was advocating (equally adamantly) that everything at least be available for reporters to enter, from headlines and summaries to links and supporting documents.

I noted that as a columnist for the web arm of the Journal, I wrote my own headlines, summaries and did all my own links — and frankly, I was goddamned if I was going to let somebody else touch that stuff. It was my work, bearing my name, and I would be the one judged on the results — not some copy editor or web producer whose name wasn’t on the story.

The print reporter looked at me like I was from Mars — which, essentially, I was.

That exchange went to the heart of a big question for our team. I advocated that the reporters not only be brought into the system, but also be forced (or at least strongly encouraged) to work within it, with as many of the story responsibilities as possible pushed “upstream” to them. That was the way we worked on the web, and the advantages of it seemed self-evident to me. Headlines and summaries would be more accurate. Interesting links or extra material was much less likely to get discarded as stories crossed from the print to the web side of the house, missed opportunities I was tired of bemoaning. Downstream, web workflows would be smarter and more humane — our night folks had a crushing workload, and were too busy putting out fires and fixing problems to read stories carefully and craft packages of links. And so on.

But this view wasn’t shared everywhere. Attitude-wise, the reporters didn’t fit into one box — some were enthusiastic webheads and agents for change, while others were digital refuseniks. Like the reporter I’d argued with, they wanted the complexity and perceived duties of the web kept as far away as possible. Sometimes this was because they were already extraordinarily busy with the difficult, demanding business of reporting and writing; other times it was because the digital world was intimidating. And they were supported — to my surprise — by some print editors and bureau chiefs, who didn’t want reporters bird-dogging their stories through the workflow. Plus there were union issues, and technology questions with reporters in the field, and a host of other reasons that supported the status quo. That was Word and email, which I objected vociferously would continue to support a text-only workflow that pushed linking and everything else downstream, to people who were too busy or removed from the story creation to do it effectively.

I suspect a lot of newsrooms have had similar debates — and the reasons are more mundane corporate or human stuff than part of some revanchist, anti-web strategy.

If I were running a newsroom and had a decent technology budget, I’d get my reporters and editors a good system, then tell them they were all working in it — and those who objected to that were welcome to explore the excellent opportunities available in corporate communications. Never waste a good crisis, as the saying goes — and that’s certainly what news organizations have. But the point is that improving systems isn’t enough. The biggest problem in most newsrooms I’ve seen is that Person X doesn’t talk to Person Y — because he can’t physically, or never has, or doesn’t want to, or has been discouraged from doing so. The killer app for those newsrooms isn’t something they can get from a vendor — it’s a better seating chart.

So it is with linking woes — in many cases, I suspect, these are people problems.

A Little Plus Sign and the Puzzle of Links (And Other Monday Reads)

Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer shows off an interesting new approach to supplemental text and additional material: He’s added sub-text to his blog posts. Winer is responding to a feature Rich Ziade added to Readability that converts hyperlinks to endnotes, and to the brouhaha over hyperlinks and distraction kicked up by Nicholas Carr, a tempest I waded into myself with a discussion of credibility, readability and connectivity.

So, to Winer’s experiment. As a reader, I dislike having sub-text open beneath the paragraph I’m reading — it gives the text a Russian-doll effect I find disorienting and distracting, and I don’t like the way it makes the visible text feel like something to skim. (Other readers’ mileage will vary, of course; for his part, Winer likes this quite a bit, precisely because it differentiates skimmers from readers.) But I’m intrigued by a potential variation on this idea, one that gets at something Salon’s Laura Miller has tried in an intriguing Carr-inspired experiment of her own. Miller has been presenting hyperlinks as endnotes, and in doing so, she found that to make those links meaningful, she had to include “additional text to explain what the source pages are and why the reader might find them valuable.” This is one of those things that immediately strikes writers as additional work, and may make them particularly unhappy once they realize (at first subconsciously) that it’s additional work that’s worth doing. Such realizations are impossible to unrealize once you’ve had them, leaving you to work out for yourself how long you’ll resist admitting what you already know to be true.

One argument against endnotes is that they remove links from their context, and therefore reduce the connective power of hyperlinks. I’m not sure about that — I tend to open links in new tabs and read them later, which makes a thorough hash of context anyway. But perhaps Winer’s plus sign offers a solution to the dilemma. What if we used his sub-text function to open supplemental material not as sub-paragraphs, but as sidebar text? You could read a piece without the distraction of hyperlinks, but take in at a glance where supplemental material can be accessed. Clicking those plus signs would open up material in the margins — definitions, footnotes, tips of the hat, goofy asides and of course hyperlinks with explanations of what those links are and why they’re potentially valuable. Readability would be enhanced, as Winer’s plus signs are less distracting than hyperlinks. Yet context would be preserved, as material would appear near to where we find hyperlinks in our current model. This, it seems to me, supports the credibility and connectivity of hyperlinks.

I don’t know if that’s the ultimate answer to the dilemma of hyperlinks and distraction. But it strikes me as worth trying.

* * *

Switching gears, my latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center looks at SB Nation’s new regional sports pages, part of a clever and efficient new product strategy for the sports-blog network. What grabbed me was how SB Nation’s effort parallels that of ESPN Local, while differing from it in some fundamental ways: It’s ground-up instead of top-down, and wholeheartedly embraces the fan point of view instead of replicating the objective, reporting-driven model of traditional news organizations.

These are intriguing times for sports bloggers and traditional sportswriters: As blogging matures and traditional news organizations grow increasingly real-time and experimental, we’re heading for a fascinating collision between two forms that are simultaneously competitive and complementary. And the fact that I may be personally caught in this slow-motion collision just adds to my eagerness to discover how it will all turn out. Buckle up!