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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."
What's that like?
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).
... I'm doing /. right now.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... I am *NOT* going to read TFA, although in this case mostly as a matter of protest, because it would require me to follow a link.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Am I alone in this? 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.
I wonder if it is just a problem for folks who aren't accustomed to this sort of reading, perhaps because they were already well into adulthood before online articles with links became prevalent? I'm no spring chicken, and grew up reading books and magazines, but I don't have a problem with this.
Moreover, I'd prefer to have plenty of links rather than have whole articles where you cannot follow the sources or fact-check easily!
I will say that sometimes links in text are annoying on mobile browsers, but that has more to do with the risk of clicking a link when trying to scroll than anything else. I do prefer when the default behavior of a link is to open in a new tab, so I don't lose my place in the original page, but that can be manually controlled if necessary.
Ads in-line with articles are a much bigger complaint for me, personally, and much more distracting when trying to read (and again, they are usually worse on mobile).
William George
Nah.
As I read the initial reports of "bump stocks," I opened another tab; put that in to Google, scanned that and continued reading.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
The problem is not links. They're like handguns, cars and nuclear weapons. It is the users who are the problems. In this case the editors and journalists who are using the links in the articles and doing a poor job of it. Place the blame where it belongs, not on the tool.
Excuse me! Exactly *WHO* is it that has the addiction to links? Certainly not the *READERS*!
Links are not the problem. In-line links can be a problem, but referencing sources is a practice which is always good and should never be discouraged. Honestly, this kind of headline is just bait: "Whaaat?" people say, "Hyperlinks can be bad? You made me drop my monocle!"
Just take the time to do it right - put your links at the end, or put them in a footnote. We have well-established and functional mechanisms for making references.
Following a link isn't fact-checking; any idiot with a web page could write random shit and link it to other random shit to "fact-check" it if that were true. Fact-checking really, as a tool for validity and reliability of information, requires more of a concerted effort for assessing those factors at every level of information summary and transmission. Was the witness lying, was the detective, or the clerk who wrote the report, etc. The former problem is precisely the one faced by the industrial world now though, because despite our well developed understanding of meta-cognition and the nature of bias in decision making people refuse to admit it or act to reduce the problems it causes.
In today's world, good journalism? That's a good one. That's rich.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
tl;dr version: A quarter century after the birth of the WWW, a web publication discovers that text on the WWW contains embedded hyperlinks to still more text, which in turn contains still more hyperlinks and so on ad infinitum.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The days are long gone where a statistic in a news article can be taken on faith. The quality of the link is far more important than the actual content that is linked to.
For example The Guardian newspaper frequently bases stories (whether you consider a "story" to mean a journalistic article: news or opinion, or a work of fiction, I will leave up to you) on "reports" that some organisation or other has published. But such is their penchant for bias, selective truths and cherry-picking "facts" that they rarely report the full picture. Since their articles do not attribute the source of those "reports", it is difficult to know whether the source is credible. The same newspaper also tends to refer to other articles it has published as "proof" that a new article is valid. In those cases, their links tell us that they are just involved in self-promotion.
Links also reward the original sources of information. Being linked-to from a reputable source will improve the trust of the original page. It might even drive a little advertising revenue their way, too.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I see three classes of links in articles.
1. Trivial ones. These lead to definitions of words and things like that. I prefer this over spending a paragraph defining terms the author may be afraid people will be unfamiliar with. If you don't need them, skip them. Even if one of these appears useless to you, it's not. It just saved you a few seconds of skimming explanatory text.
2. Fact verification. Sometimes these are pure CYA, so that if something dicey proves to be false, the author can say "it wasn't me that made it up, I was just going with my sources". Other times they are a defense against the troll hordes and autists looking to challenge the basic validity of an article based on "fake news" which really isn't. Unfortunately the only way to tell the difference is to look.
3. The author (or company's) back catalog. This can be perfectly legitimate – why should someone have to paraphrase themselves when expanding on a prior article if you can just read it? But other times it's little more than a scheme to drive more click-throughs. Unless it has a particularly clickbaity title, the only option here is also to look and see.
The solution I implement is to take or leave Type 1, and to launch Type 2 and Type 3 in the background and read them after the current article if indeed I read them at all. Sometimes it is sufficient merely to know where the link goes, to know what agenda is likely to be pushed. This still can result in a Wiki-Walk style vortex, but at least it only pulls me off topic after I've read the initial article.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
As long as the color of the link isn't overly distracting
You're not alone. You just happened to reiterate the fundamental point of the article.
If you want a reading experience without links, read a book. If you want links, use the Internet. Both have their place :)
I'm always distracted trying to decide if I need to read a foot note right at the moment I come across it, or finish the current paragraph, often going on to the next page. For this reason I prefer endnotes.
The problem of too many links or their misuse has been discussed in depth at TV Tropes.
Personally I find the worst offense is when the links are apparently automatically generated from randomly-picked keywords. Phys.org does this, and the links merely redirect to a "news tagged with" search, which is IMO worse than useless.
Being able to see what source a writer is pulling from is a good first step in fact checking something. If the link goes to a sketchy site - somewhere known for heavily biased content, for example - then you can get an idea of the likelihood that the information is true and un-skewed. If it is a site you aren't familiar with, you could begin to research the reputation of the site, or follow further links to additional sources. It is not sufficient alone, and there are other ways to go about fact checking as well, but being able to follow link trails is extremely helpful in my experience.
William George
I was speaking subjectively. In my experience, as long as the text of the link is similar enough in color to the rest of the text then I can read right through it without distraction. In fact, I often don't even notice links the first time through - even if they are underlined - and have to go back afterward and look for them (if I want to dig further).
No, I haven't been tested to see if this subjective perception is accurate... but if there was a big enough distraction or delay in processing the link text then I think I would notice - and likely be bothered, as the author of the article seemed to be (going from the /. summary).
I guess what I am saying is that, personally, having some visible form of emphasis on words to denote a link is not a problem for me - so long as the distinction is not so extreme, particularly in regards to color choice of the text itself. Underlines don't bother me.
William George
Oh, was the author concerned with the degree to which the link was different from the rest of the text? I didn't notice that, as it seemed like their emphasis was more on the presence of links in the text at all. For example, they wrote "Every link stops you in your tracks and forces you to make a choice—keep reading, or move on?"
I personally don't find links to cause that dilemma. I treat them instead as the digital equivalent of footnotes: I read right past them, but if I want to come back later and get more info or check out the author's sources then I will go back and follow the links at my convenience.
William George