Linked Out
Links are a powerful transparency tool, but only in moderation, and not as a substitute for the basics of writing and argumentation.
By Theodore Ross
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.
No one reasonably expects to track each aspect of a reporter’s work via hyperlink. Publications should have expectations for their readers, and a certain level of readerly sophistication can still be assumed. Pop culture readers usually know something about pop culture, and I write and edit as if they do. Likewise, a Politico story on Bernie Sanders in 2019 doesn’t need a link to Sanders’ government website. That isn’t professionalism; it’s condescension, to reader and publication.
But it’s not the overuse of factual links that concern me. It is the way links are used to assume agreement.
Consider the below sentence. I’ve made it up, and it is decidedly hyperbolic, but it is representative of the linking problem I’ve encountered among many digital writers:
Neoliberal policies, which might be called a terrorist collaboration between government and moneyed interests, have reaped significant social damage in New York, and other cities; the valiant activists who put a stop to the Amazon headquarters in Queens have shown a way to stop that damage, and they deserve credit.
Now think about how it might be hyperlinked for presentation online:
Neoliberal policies [link here defining neoliberal and/or neoliberal policies], which might be called a terrorist collaboration between government and moneyed interests [link here with some sort of example of that, or some research showing a connection between the two], have reaped significant social damage in New York [link], and other cities [link]; the valiant activists [link] who put a stop to the Amazon headquarters in Queens [link] have shown a way to stop that damage [link], and they deserve credit [link for kicker].
I would never publish this sentence. The linking is as dense as the writing; it’s annoying, and likely to send the convergence-insufficiency-plagued digital reader clicking off to some other site, never to return. Most important, it would fail in its predicate purpose, which is to shed light on the author’s claims.
It would take commitment on the part of any reader to connect the rhetoric (my opinions about economics and Amazon’s failed corporate-housing welfare bid) to the forms of legitimacy (links to putatively inarguable facts). To make those connections, a reader would have to, at the very least, root around in a bunch of context-free reports, news clips, and ideologically weighted sources. (One of the links in the second version of the sentence leads to Jacobin magazine, “a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”) A link to a chronology of Amazon’s HQ2 tribulations is easy, but what is the single, straightforward link to a definitive explanation of why neoliberalism is bad? You’d also have to do some rhetorical free-association to figure out how I was putting everything together, and give me some benefit of the intellectual and informational doubt. The contemporary internet may be about many things — I would suspect it is still mostly about porn — but benefit of the doubt isn’t among the biggies.
This isn’t just a lazy sentence. It’s a form of argumentative obfuscation. Even with most of the links consisting of factual support, the sentence is really designed for a reader whose politics skew leftward and align with the premise. It doesn’t bother with a conservative reader, or a moderate, if such a person exists, or even someone who is indifferent to economic thought but anxious about renting an apartment in Long Island City. But it doesn’t state that. Instead, it presents its collection of facts as authoritative, and uses links to circumvent discussion and argument. Media bubbles, echo chambers and transparency deficiencies take many forms. Writing that leans on bundles of links — some of them ideologically charged, mixed with simple definitions — are one of their lazier and more insidious forms.
There’s another version of the sentence that does the work of supporting its thesis in writing. It is longer. Maybe much longer. It might be more mechanical. The reader might click away in boredom. But one of the demands of good journalism is to sway the unsure reader, to convince with fact and reporting and argument. Links often look like they are doing some part of that work. But most of the time they really aren’t. As Nicholas Carr once observed in widely read essay in The Atlantic, they are a big part of why the internet is “making us stupid.” (Carr would later experiment with moving links — those “textual gnats, buzzing” — to the bottom of the page.)
The increasing complexity of media transparency, and the urgent need for it, have only grown more acute over time. More than ever, reporters must take on the more arduous labor of persuasion. Publications have undergone the same kind of class and ideological sorting seen in American communities and the electorate. If every publication has a partisan slant, explicit or assumed, and only engages with readers who share that slant, what’s the point of making an argument that would win people who might disagree? They’re reading a different publication. The link is part of the same polarization of American society that gives us gerrymandered voting, fake news, and the various things wrong with Kansas.
This is not a call for squishy, centrist, civil, bipartisan catering to some ideal of “objective” journalism. Quite the opposite — hit the other side hard, whichever side you’re on, but do so thoroughly and without lazy and ultimately counterproductive shortcuts; that’s doing the work of bringing people onto yours.
As for what the ideal, delinked version of the sample sentence would look like, there is no single answer, and it’s not the editor’s job to write it. When bouncing the draft back to my hypothetical digital journalist, I would fall back on another time-tested shorthand: Better sentence TK.
Theodore Ross is a contributing editor at The New Republic. He’s also been an editor at Harper’s and Men’s Journal. He’s written for the New York Times Magazine, BusinessWeek and Jezebel, among many other publications. Follow him @theodoreross on Twitter.
Production DetailsV. 1.0.2
Last edited: February 27, 2019
Author: Theodore Ross
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Illustration: Photo by Bryson Hammer on Unsplash