I caught this article by Paul Farhi on washingtonpost.com this morning covering CNN’s use of their fancy new “Magic Wall” in the on-going election coverage. The Magic Wall was developed by Perceptive Pixel, the company leading the large-format chage for the multi-touch operating system developed by founder, Jeff Han. Multi-touch is most famous for its application in the iPhone.
Typically, when you provide a link in the text for your readers, the intent is to provide a direct connection to the highlighted element. If I’m writing about Perceptive Pixel and the land-of-awesome technology they’re developing, I might provide you, dear reader, with a direct link here: Perceptive Pixel. Notice how you’re delivered directly to the Perceptive Pixel website, where you can watch a fantastic demo of the technology in action.
WaPo handles things a bit differently — and oh, so annoyingly. In the above example, if you read the paragraph leading up to the “Daily Show” link, you have an expectation that you’ll be delivered directly to the Tatton video directly on the Daily Show website. (As it happens, I couldn’t find the specific video on the Daily Show site, but I did find it quite easily on YouTube).
In my example above, if you click on the YouTube link, you’re delivered straight to the video. No fuss. But WaPo has a different idea. For every link in this article on the site, you’re taken to a page like this:
A link farm. A book of links from inside the Post, on the web, on blogs, wherever, and totally functionally useless in my effort to get more information on the specific topic at hand. If I’m looking for the specific Daily Show Abbi Tatton piece, how am I supposed to find it in a list of references titled non-specifically, “Highlights”? I’m left to presume that the only function of these pages is to serve the needs of the site, in order to drive traffic — not to serve my needs as the consumer.
To be fair, the other big mainstream media news sites have a similar practice. For example, in an article posted on today’s nytimes.com front page, “Myanmar Proceeeds with Vote, Outcome Uncertain,” there are a number of links throughout the text. The difference is in context. If I click on the link to Myanmar, I get a well formatted information portal on the nytimes.com site educating me on the country. If I click on “United Nations”, I see this:
The Times has chosen to link to the topics for which the can specifically provide more information.
Another example: the WaPo article specifically references a video available online which cannot be found within the article itself. How does the times handle such a scenario?
They embed the video right into the flow of the piece. In this article titled “Young Video Makers Try to Alter Islam’s Face“, there are several examples of outbound linking to complete the experience for the reader. On WaPo, about the only place you can hunt down the same sort of progressive linking is in the columns, where writers apparently have a bit more freedom to link out.
Your reader’s experience is all wrapped up in a number of conflicting components. They want information presented efficiently, yet they want enough to make spending the time worthwhile. In news, they want relevance, timliness, and impact, but they want it all while not appearing as though they’re being taken advantage of, even though they may, in fact, be tools. But most of all, they don’t want to be teased. Clear, direct linking on relevant topics in your own writing will help you build reputation, and keep your readers coming back to your site for more.