Are Hyperlinks Hurting Media Transparency?
From “Linked Out,” an article I just published at News to Table, a new publication from the folks at Pressland:
Editors all share the same time-honored barrel of clichés to advise and coax good work out of anxious writers. Kill your darlings. Write what you know. Pay your taxes quarterly. We use these clichés because they work and because they tend to be true. Simple writing is usually the best writing. What you know is more likely to be accurate than what you do not know. Annual tax bills are a bitch.
With digitally native journalists, some new clichés are in order. My first recommendation, my most effective nugget of high-legacy, low-shamanic wisdom, is this: There are no links in print.
This may sound obvious, but it isn’t. Over and over again, I have found myself having to explain this to otherwise fast, clean, and smart reporters who came up in the age of links. For most of the history of modern journalism, facts could not be embedded. During the long reign of print, journalists learned to make their case with language, on the page, in their own words.
Yes, links are a useful transparency tool. Readers can see what evidence the writer has marshaled, sourced in other, ideally reputable, places. They can discern, without mediation, the veracity on which the writing rests and follow threads beyond the scope of the piece itself. Used sparingly and at their best, links can exemplify the great promise that the internet has always held for journalism and other forms of intellectual pursuit. Linking is credibility. It is communication. It is community.
But links don’t always fulfill this promise. All too often, they do the opposite. Over-reliance on them can undercut the power and reach of an argument in ways that many digital-first writers do not fully comprehend.
