For the record, this post is not at all about The New York Times. Almost all of the major news sites do something similar.
Here is a completely random URL from a post in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/us/13emissions.html?bl&ex=1189915200&en=ece3e83bef34f856&ei=5087%0A
I think I found that one by clicking through from Google News or Yahoo! News. The stuff after the question mark is junk they use for statistical tracking. I don’t like being a statistic. Plus, I don’t like including weird numbers that I’m not sure what they stand for in a link. Instead, when I put links into my blogs and happen to think about it, I try to stript the URL down as much as I can and still end up at the page I’m linking to. In the case above, it can be stripped down to this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/us/13emissions.html
That’s quite a bit smaller, cleaner, and easier to read. Plus, since I have no idea what those values are that are getting sent in the first URL, I’m not completely comfortable including them in a link. Are they personally identifying? Probably not. But it is easy enough to get rid of it and not have to worry about what might be hiding there.
I read something today that got me thinking. Believe it or not it was this article about Mischa Barton getting hospitalized because or a reaction to medication that I read on Yahoo! News.
It got me thinking about how information spreads between new news sources like blogs and old offline news sources.
Here is how my thinking went:
Who is Mischa Barton? Oh, some lady on some TV show that I don’t watch.
How did this get on Yahoo! News? Ah, the Yahoo! News article is really a Reuters article that Yahoo! posted. That’s a very old school, newspaper way of purchasing content.
How did Reuters learn about this and why is there so little information? They read TMZ.com. The Reuters article says:
Actress Mischa Barton, former star of the hit television series “The O.C.,” was taken to a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a reaction to medication, the celebrity news Web site TMZ.com reported on Monday.
Why didn’t Reuters link to the original article? Reuters clearly read the original TMZ article since they quote directly from it for most of their article. Would it have killed them to link to the original article on TMZ.com? I came up with two answers for that.
Reuters is used for offline newspaper articles and dropping a link into offline print is awkward at best.
Reuters does not want to be associated with a celebrity gossip site of the likes of TMZ.com. At the time of this writing, the Recent Posts listed under the Mischa Barton article are:
Not exactly Pulitzer stuff, but if Reuters is going to get their celebrity news from the more entertaining news sources, they should embrace them…or at least link to them.
I’m of the opinion that if you are going to quote an online source for distribution to other online sources, than you should link to the source. This is the internet after all. Let me go read what was really said.
Maybe Reuters should offer versions of their articles with links for online distributors to use and without links for offline. Or maybe they should just give up the offline version without links all together. After all, aren’t newspapers dying?
Reddit recently add sub domains for Slate and The New York Times. So far, Slate seems to be quite a bit more popular if the number of votes is any indication. It sounds like Reddit is trying to demonstrate to potential buyers how much they can help increase traffic. Or maybe one of the developers just thought it would be a good idea.
The question is whether the voting capability of a site like Reddit would ever have any value to a traditional media brand.
Netscape is finding out the hard way that making big changes from passive to active users does not always happen without complaints. Not everybody wants to spend time participating. A lot of people are just spending their lunch time surfing the news and expect the site they are visiting to organize it for them. There is a certain comfort that comes from repeated use of sites with strong editorial control.
A news source like Slate and The New York Times could get a nice benefit from the risk, though. In real time, and in a very direct way, they would be able to see which articles were the most popular. If analyzed properly, they could use that information to target news stories that would appeal to their readers.
That benefit comes with its own risk. Slashdot gets suggestions for articles from users and then the editors decide what belongs on the main page and what belongs on the category pages. The editors are frequently accused of supporting or being biased against certain topics. When people feel proud or slighted, it is normally the edge cases that seem to have the strongest reaction. If an article on a school board voting on discussing Intelligent Design gets a ton of response from the pro/con-ID groups, does that mean that the readers want more stories about ID, or are there a large group of readers that are bored by the story but just remain silent.
The writers would have to sort through the noise and find a way to figure out what the readers really want.
If one of the traditional media sites decides to try to give the story placement control to the readers, they would be better off offering the new Diggified version of the site AND the old editor sorted version of the site. To try and encourage voting from the old school users, they could include the vote buttons next to each story in the old layout, too.
Netscape should have gone this route with their recent change to user controlled content. There’s no reason the two kinds of filtering of data couldn’t have occurred together.
Somebody like Slate or The New York Times would be at an even greater disadvantage to switch to a voting system since they would have a much smaller story base to pull from. It’s not like The New York Times is going to want you reading editorials from other newspapers that are hosted on their competitors site. They need you focused on their own articles and ads.
Very few readers are going to get too excited about having the small number of articles a traditional print media site deals with on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis on a voting type site especially if all the articles come from one source and without allowing users to submit their own stories they find on the internet. They’ll just go to Digg or Reddit and read the best of the newspapers and magazines that make it to the top of their aggregator site.