Return to Fallows Central Breaking the News: The Links Media
Commentary
The Link Fuss: Why
Care? Update One: "Why Can't I Link to Dad's
Obit?" Two: How Long Will My Father's Obit Stay
Linkable? Three: HotWired on "Back
Issue"--and More Free Advice for the Post Four: Eternity
on L Street: The Post's Free Area Will Let
You Search the Obits for a Whole Month Five: Post
Rethinking Links Policy
Six: A Welcome to Post
Readers--Update of March 24, 1997 (the September Postscripts
Include Links to Editor & Publisher)
By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
Some grassroots sites on the Web link to articles in major publications--so that a mouse click on a highlighted word can send you directly to the full story. Why not? Aren't newspeople forever telling Netfolks to avoid rumor-spreading and use reputable sources?
Enter now some classic media hypocrisy or at least A Bad Lapse of Judgment.
Accidentally or not, the Washington Post, hardly shy about scolding the Net, has now ended outsiders' ability to link for any length of time to articles in its electronic library on the Web. Try the Post links at Fallows Central these days and you will see error messages in your Netscape or Internet Explorer. At least for the moment, the links are kaput, even one that we made earlier in January. Before The Great Link Kill, the Post connections were surviving for months on end. True, outside Web sites had to make the links in the two weeks before the articles vanished from the search engine, but once locked in, they would endure for a decent stretch.
Ironically the Post might be shooting itself in a Yeti-size foot. The newspaper's thousands of library pages contain links to its home page--and to ads that help pay for the site. The more people see electronic clips, the more valuable the whole site is to advertisers. What's more, the Post hasn't even begun to tap the potential here. Normally its library pages on the Web do not carry ads targeted for maximum appeal to consumers interested in a certain topic. But with the new database technology, this will be easier and easier for the Post and other publications. Even in a business sense alone--forget about good citizenship for the moment--it is foolish to let the gradually accumulated pointers from other Web sites vanish into the ether. The ad model does not yield much in most cases right now, but will pay off as more Americans go on the Web and as the technology for reading electronic text improves.
Yet another argument exists for encouraging readers to link their sites to Webbed news stories. Publications can use free services such as AltaVista and HotBot to determine the number of links to individual articles and even identify the linking sites. Imagine the usefulness of such feedback in gauging readers' interest in specific topics and finding out how Netfolks are using the material. Just as the Web now teems with scads of activist sites devoted to national issues, those on local matters will become more common--all the more reason for the media to get into the right habits now. Rather than rigging Web sites to hide articles from searchers like AltaVista, newspapers should make almost everything indexable. Easily found links, to and from newspaper libraries, can be a blessing for both journalism and enlightened activism.
The Post is hardly the only example of the media's underappreciation of links. None other than the New York Times has refused to reproduce on the open Web some articles critical of civic journalism and James Fallows--or at least turn the articles over to our site without demanding hundreds of dollars. Jim wanted Netfolks to read both sides of the debate. So did some editors at the Times. What terrific theater. Last I knew, however, the Netphobic traditionalists were winning on this little matter at the expense of both their employer and the Web as a whole.
At U.S. News and World Report, which Jim edits, not every back clip is online; but most of the recent articles seem to be, and the links seem stable. You search on a topic, pick out an item you want, jot down the Web address or paste it into your personal page, then forge a link that will last for months--well, at least so far. The Atlantic, where he's a contributing editor, has likewise tried not to inflict electronic barriers on civic-minded people linking their Web sites to its electronic library.
Please note that while I disagree with the Post's own linking policy, I support its legal right to be obtuse. We're not talking about violations of law. Besides, a technological action is preferable to the lawsuit that the eccentrics at the Shetland Times launched against the Shetland News for doing what comes naturally and linking to Times articles. Understand, too, that linking isn't the same as copying news articles to your Web site without permission; that is and should be illegal. Also, no one can guarantee that old newspapers clips will be free online forever, or at least not without a Carnegie-style national digital library.
What the press can do, though, is to treat Webbed clips in ways that promote well-informed public debate. If big newspapers and magazines must start charging for individual articles on the Web, they should keep the fees very very small. And they should set up their sites to make it a snap for grassroots areas to point reliably to the articles; readers if need be could pay homage to Mammon on story-specific pages. Can't Americans better hold our government officials accountable for their past actions if citizens' sites on the Web can send readers directly to the right clips? Might this not be one rather timely justification for the oft-besieged First Amendment, especially in the wake of a megadollar ruling in a North Carolina libel case against ABC? How to justify the media's rights if articles are too costly or too inconvenient for citizens to use in modern ways like the Web? Oh, it's possible, but not as much if the press is less hypocritical.
And in this era of a "many to many" Net, doesn't it make sense for the media to blend in with the rest of the electronic world in the interest of commercial survival? Right now only a fraction of Netfolks regularly visit newspaper sites, and if the Washington Post's apparent linking policy is any clue, it's easy to see one reason why. The newspapers bungled when it set up its Digital Ink service on a proprietary network rather than go on the open and popular Internet. Do the editors really want a Postcentric mindset to prevail again at the expense of the paper's long-term prosperity? And finally, didn't Katharine Graham herself once say that "good journalism" is good for bottom line, too? An intelligent linking policy, cultivating the loyalties of Webbed, civic-minded readers, would help carry this philosophy over to the Net.
Meanwhile, just in case the Post makes its library linkable again, Fallows Central will temporarily leave the (would-be) links in place.
So will some other pages, in my own Web areas.
Oh, and no pettiness here. The New York Times has linked to me at least twice; and the Post, my hometown paper, is as welcome as ever to do the same. Here's to democracy and an open Web.
By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
I've just returned from Emergency Room Three at Fairfax Hospital in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. My father, Harry Edward Rothman, died of a heart ailment at 86. He was the last of his generation of a hardworking Russian-Jewish family, one of whose ancestors had to collect taxes for the Tsar.* Dad himself put up with the anti-Semitism of the old civil service, suffered under troglodytic bosses, painted in his old age, found happiness and recognition at the easel, then got trapped anew in bureaucracy on his last day on earth. Thanks to the medical bureaucracy, my father could not enter Mt. Vernon Hospital, the one closest to him, even though he was moaning in pain and sick enough to die later that day. Instead the ambulance had to wend its way across the county to Fairfax Hospital, and when he got there, the doctors squandered time debating who would treat him, and a physician even suggested that he might be able go home. Hours after his last heartbeat, people were still mulling over such questions as, "Who signs the death certificate?" Bureaucracy did not kill my much-missed father--he had a pacemaker and probably would have died even without the bungling--but worsened both his suffering and ours.
Now I'm thinking of another bureaucracy, the business bureaucracy of the electronic newsroom--the bureaucracy that apparently has led the Washington Post's electronic library to war against links from personal Web sites and the rest of the Internet. The Net and links seem trivial at a moment like this; and at the right time I'll have more to say, about Dad himself, in my personal Web area. [Some of my thoughts ended up in a eulogy read Feb. 2, 1997, at Temple Beth El in Alexandria, Virginia.] But the routine of the day can the best way to cope with grief, so I'll write here about death in the context of the linking controversy discussed in the essay above. This is an era of the personal home page and, increasingly, the family page; and sooner or later a rather legitimate question is bound to come up in many a household when the first shock has subsided: "Why can't I link to Dad's obit?"**
The electronic libraries of newspapers are not just repositories for news of council votes, sewage hearings or zoning protests; they also preserve records of births, marriages, deaths and other Milestones. And in the era of the Web and capacious storage, they will be able to do so with more detail than before. The Post itself is trying to cover as much neighborhood news online as it can; and that's sensible, given the eagerness of companies such as Microsoft to usurp the role of daily newspapers. Ideally the death of a Harry Rothman in the future could be fodder for a fair-sized item in an electronic morgue, whether or not he was famous. And families could point from their personal pages. But what if the bureaucrats controlling the Post's Webbed library are still warring against reliable links from readers' Web sites?
I myself am optimistic that L Street and its digital offshoot will rethink their linking policies sooner or later. If not, then some Webbed readers may forsake the Post for more Net-friendly alternatives in the future, and if the editors combine such mistakes with other Netphobic actions, then the newspaper itself may end up as a morgue item.
David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net, Jan. 28, 1997
By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
The Post obit was fine. Yes, perfectionists might object about details. The newspaper used "Government Accounting Office" instead of "General Accounting Office," for example, in discussing my father's career there several decades ago. But who knows--maybe the agency's name was different then. At any rate I'm sympathetic toward well-meaning people working under deadline. And now...the link to the Jan. 30 item on Harry Rothman, Accountant (scroll to bottom of the linked page). If you're reading in the next few weeks, you'll see it. But after that? Unless the Post changes its medieval linking policy, the link to my father's obit will vanish.
To understand the point I'm making, make sure you've read the present page from the beginning on down.
David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net, Jan. 30, 1997
Tuning
in late? See top of page and read on down
By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
Back Issue, by HotWired columnist Brooke Shelby Biggs,
questions the linking policies of the 
Washington Post's archives on the Web.
It's a useful, well-done piece even if I don't fully agree with
it. And, yes, Webfolks, it'll end up with a permanent Web
address, reachable from the Biggs archives, if
it lacks one already. Significantly we're talking some related
commerce here. An accompanying ad says today's column was
"made possible by Aurora from Oldsmobile." I'm all in
favor of capitalism supporting good journalism, as long as no one
interferes; and I doubt that GM is breathing down Biggs's neck to
praise or downplay stable Web links. It's just happy to let
Fallows Central and other linked-in sites help move cars.
Few Web areas draw as many ads from GM and other corporations as HotWired does, however. And at this stage in the development of the Web, even it must fight for its commercial life. Understandably worried about the profitability of newspapers and magazines on the Net, Biggs says the Post isn't trying to "shortchange" the public with plans for its new pay-per-read archive. She says it just wants to make money in this unfamiliar territory.
But she concludes that the Post and some other papers are "spending too much time chasing pennies and too little time molding a strategy to become more efficient information providers using the Net's incredible storage and distribution benefits."
So what are my own thoughts on the money question here? Well, deliberately or not, the Post at the least is shortchanging and balkanizing the Web, a medium built and held together with links. Remember, that the link controversy isn't quite the same as the one over "pay per read" vs. "free." If a paper really wants to charge for individual articles, it can and still maintain stable links. Fallows Central is now linking to an article in a password-protected area of the New York Times. And if the Times wanted, the piece could be "pay per read" rather than merely password-protected.
No matter what the business model, the big goal should be to help guide Netfolks to the exact material they want. Newspapers should strive to be ubiquitous on the Web. And links truly are the newsstands of cyberspace. Webbed papers cost much less to distribute than dead-tree ones, so the newsstand analogy is not perfect; but the parallel holds up in the way that most counts. Like newsstands, links bring in readers and are stockholders' friends.
* * *
How can the Washington Post use the Web better to make money and serve readers better--so that, for example, it's easier for civic groups to link in from their local Web sites? Here are a few friendly suggestions for Jason Seiken, editor of WashingtonPost.com.
David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net, Feb. 25, 1997
Tuning
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By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
"Why Can't I Link to Dad's obit?" I asked in my little campaign to get the Washington Post to show good Webiquette and preserve links to news stories.
So what's the corporate response from L Street? Coincidentally or not, the topic of obits came up in a March 1 newsletter that the editor of WashingtonPost.com sent out to the "Postnote" mailing list--as usual, without his personal e-mail address attached.
Editor Jason Seiken chirped: "Now you can search both the obituaries and the paid death notices from The Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/obits.htm."
In the fast-paced world at the Washington Post, the newscrats have apparently decided that one month is long enough for readers to be able to look up obits for free on the Web. Forget about eternity. That's for the boonies down south.
Still, it's good that L Street has finally figured out that obits are special in cyberspace as well as Real Life.
Also encouraging is that the Web address of the new feature actually includes the word "longterm," as do some other permanent items on the Post site.
Does this mean that the obits will remain linkable for more than a month? It's March 5 as I write this, and so far the Post has not killed the link to the Jan. 30 obit. Stay tuned. Let's hope that the Post is slowing retreating from its "here today, gone tomorrow" link policy.
Something else has happened. The Post, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, ABC and The National Journal have shut down their jointly run PoliticsNow site--perhaps in part for want of enough advertising support. The corporate spinmeisters rose to the occasion: "Reflecting the changing nature of the Web, the partners decided to focus their political coverage on their individual online initiatives." I myself appreciated what PoliticsNow was doing, but wish the site had taken more care to encourage links from the Net's thousands of activism-related sites. The content, too, could have been more Net-oriented. The death of PoliticsNow is a reminder of the fate awaiting WashingtonPost.com if the newscrats do not take more care to become a true part of the Net. R.I.P.
David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net, March 5, 1997
March 12 Postscript: Within the past week or so, the newscrats have killed off the link from my personal home page to my father's obit. An automated message told me: "The requested object does not exist on this server." What compassion from WashingtonPost.com.
May 15 Postcript: In fairness to the Washington Post, it now appears that the PoliticsNow site was a financial success by the usual standards of the Web. But the revenue still wasn't high enough for Post to want to share it with other news organizations such as the ABC branch of Walt Disney conglomerate. L Street felt it could do better on its own. If that's the case, then it should be good business for the Post to encourage informal links from other sites--since the PoliticsNow will no longer be around to drive readers toward the Post stories (and possible ads there).
Tuning
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By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
The Washington Post is giving its present linking policy a good, hard look, according to what I'm hearing out of L Street. No formal promises so far. But I'm glad that people are showing open minds. Thanks! Stable links to archived articles would be in the interest of everyone--not just voters and schoolchildren relying on the Web for information, but also the Post's own advertisers and stockholders. I've already explained to L Street the financial benefits.
* * *
Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, it appears that I've won a letter-to-the-editor lotto of sorts. Earlier I'd objected to a Post columnist's belief that the Net rather than her paper was at fault when links to old stories went south--click before the link to her column vanishes. Now my letter on Topic L is at least scheduled to run tomorrow, Monday, March 24. It's to be the first letter in a new feedback section that WashTech, part of the Washington Business section, has set up.
The Post had been thinking about the feedback section earlier, and I'm delighted that such a needed feature is on the way--the editorial page often hesitates to run letters on business topics not deemed worthy of popular concern.
WashTech is even letting me mention the Web address of this page. How often has the Post allowed a letter to the editor to do this? My appreciation to WashTech!
I'll hope that the editors of the editorial page in Section A will takes the hint eventually. Who knows, perhaps in this new era, the editorial staff will even accept letters via e-mail. Would you believe, editors can use the telephone to confirm the origins of an e-mailed letter just as easily as they can those of a snailed one?
David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net, March 23, 1997
Tuning
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By David H.
Rothman
Webmaster, Fallows Central
Thanks for stopping by after seeing the Web address in my letter on Page F20 of the Washington Business section of March 24. I appreciated, too, the paper's fair play here. For background on another link-related controversy, see an online version of my recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. I wrote about an obtuse Scottish newspaper that forced a Web-based rival to stop linking to its news stories. This happened even through the second paper was sending more traffic to the bullies' Web site and any possible ads that Paper A might care to post there. Along with the Monitor article, you'll find links to other legal battles over links, including a lawsuit in which the Post itself is a plaintiff.
Issues in those cases, however, differ from the exact ones here. To its credit, the Post is not siccing lawyers on Fallows Central. Rather L Street is yanking most news articles from its free archives after only a month or so--lessening the online edition's value to us, other citizens and schools, and technologically preventing us from making permanent links to the Post site. I've already noted how the Post could use permanent links even with password and pay-per-read arrangements. Whatever the business model, stable links could help the Post by increasing the readership of its Web area.
The irony of the Day: Yes, if the Post does its usual Stupid Web tricks, the above link to my own letter on Page F20 will vanish from the Webbed archive after a month or so.
David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net, March 24, 1997
August 13 Postscript: The Post soon killed the link to the letter on Page F20, and I have yet to hear of any more progress on the link front. Although Jason Seiken has stepped down as editor of WashingtonPost.com, his successor, Leslie Walker, has been just as uncommunicative. Worse, I have found Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser to be aggressively uninterested in the link question. Just what is the story here? Overholser claims that WashingtonPost.com is outside her jurisdiction. And yet she has written on other Net-related topics. Why no dialogue here? I've offered to visit the Post and step by step explain linking and its importance to the Net, but to no avail. Overholser has written her share of good columns, and I find her action or inaction to be out of character. Meanwhile, WashingtonPost.com notwithstanding, the pulped-wood Post continues to show more than a few traces of technophobia. Just today an editorial complained of "persistent, and totally false, rumors and documents that constantly circulate on the Net." If conscientious Web sites could link reliably to the Post and other mainstream media, however, couldn't Netfolks more easily find alternative to "rumors"?
September 9 Postscript: The September 5 edition of Editor & Publisher Interactive carries a Net-smart column from Steve Outing: Online Obits: Newspapers Miss an Obvious Opportunity. If I were Donald Graham, I'd make the piece required reading for everyone at WashingtonPost.com. The Outing column does not just suggest stable links for obits and an opportunity for readers to write their own farewells for Net editions of newspapers. He also calls for online papers to run wedding messages from readers and friends--with ads to appear from department stores that hold the brides' registries. If Ronald Dupont Jr. isn't available as a consultant, maybe WashingtonPost.com can bring in Outing. Please note that I don't necessarily agree with Outing on everything, but it is clear to me that he genuinely understands the importance of obits to readers. May other journalists follow. In this week's U.S. News and World Report, a headline asks: "Are journalists people?" If ripped-up obit links continue to be the norm, then such a question would apply to far more than the French paparazzi.
September 27 Postscript: Also please see Steve Outing's September 24-25 and 26 articles supporting fixed Web links. I myself would prefer free, ad-supported archives with stable links, but if that isn't possible, newspapers could use fixed links with pay-per-read articles that were free for the first few weeks. Outing has skillfully shown how fixed links would be good for p-p-r with an arrangement like this. If nothing else, he recognizes the desirability of newspapers putting obits, birth notices and other public-service items on the Web for free with fixed links. And, of course, even if information is pay-per-read from the start, fixed links are still the way to go.
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*The Tsar story came from my late uncle, Martin Rothman, who edited the Journal of the Connecticut State Dental Association and who, if born later, would be just the kind to be on the Web with a home page including his favorite media links. [Return to main text.]
**This example isn't hypothetical. The Post printed Dad's obit January 30. Staff writers Joe Smith and Bart Barnes talked to us in an exemplary, professional manner. Smith's first words were, "My sympathy"--setting the tone for what followed. Too bad the linking policy has not shown the same sensitivity at this point to the public's needs. [Return to main text.]
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