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'Our Addiction To Links is Making Good Journalism Harder To Read' (qz.com)
The building blocks of the web have become its intellectual Achilles' heel, Quartz reports. Links have turned against us, and they're making it impossible to read and learn. From a report: I know, you got here via a link. Links are crucial for navigation and seem instinctively useful to journalism. But when they're embedded within an article that should be a calm, focused learning experience, they are a gateway to distraction and information addiction. A 2005 study suggested that "increased demands of decision-making and visual processing" in text with links reduced reading comprehension -- a challenge we face every day as we try to parse the web's infinite information. Last week, one of my favorite publications ran a thoughtful, well-written article that I could barely read. It contained 57 links in less than 2,000 words. Today, the top five articles on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal averaged a link every 197 words -- that's one link for every minute of reading. Since the advent of the written word, there's only been one reason to change the color, style or weight of text: emphasis. Your eye is trained to pause and assign added importance to any word that carries a different style than the words before it. A great article deserves focus, and it's almost impossible to achieve any level of focus when random words are emphasized for no reason other than their association with a previous article or the fact that they refer to an outside resource. Read the full story on Quartz.
There's a generation of writers and editors today who believe that the inclusion of a boat-load of hyperlinks obviates the need to provide any background for the reader. Slashdot's cradleful of content-curators are among the worst offenders. They say, "I don't have to explain anything, just clink on the link and you'll understand!" I say, "Learn to write, you lazy sons of bitches, before I remind your ad sales guys that you are intentionally driving your readers off your site."
If you can't read an article because some of the text is tinted blue you have bigger problems. I hope you never have to read a scholarly article with all those distracting footnotes. Providing links to enable people to get more information is a huge boon, and you can easily ignore the links if the summary in the article was sufficient for your level of interest, or you are already steeped in the previous writings on the subject. In the later case it is much easier to skip over a single blue link than to have to skim paragraphs and paragraphs of information you already read the last time the issue was reported on to get to the kernel of new information, which is what reading the news used to be like (and don't get me started on inverted pyramid writing style - thank god that has all but died).
Linking to an official source or out of one's website is good. It's a citation-style linking. It's when there are links for no good reason that you get bad linking.
Good Link:
(CNN) The president announced today that the Paris Climate Accord (linked to Wiki) would continue tentatively based on continued good faith measures.
Bad Link:
(CNN) (link to CNN stock) The president (link to all recent CNN articles with Trump) announced today that the Paris Climate Accord (link to the last time Trump talked about PCA) would continue tentatively based on continued good faith (link to CNN - Religion Section) measures.
For example, an article about the recent Las Vegas shooting would have links embedded that explain what bump stocks are and why they need to be banned.
Yes, modern media would completely ignore any arguments why banning them would not solve the problem. Just tell us they should be banned and we'll pick up the baton and lead the chorus.
This is good journalism
Presenting one side of a constitutional argument is always "good journalism" -- for one side of the argument.
Minus that bump stocks haven't been banned yet, I fail to see any problem here.
Hmmm. No, I suspect you wouldn't.
As long as the color of the link isn't overly distracting - darker shades of green, blue, grey, etc work well if the text itself is black - then I am fine with it.
How do you know? Are you just reporting your subjective perception, or have you actually tested it?
Subjective perceptions of cognitive performance are often terrible.
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