D0TheMath's Shortform

Garrett Baker

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Probably my biggest pet-peeve of trying to find or verify anything on the internet nowadays is that newspapers never seem to link to or cite (in any useful manner) any primary sources they use, unless weirdly if any of those primary sources come from Twitter.

There have probably been hundreds of times by now that I have seen an interesting economic or scientific claim made by The New York Times, or some other popular (or niche) newspaper, wanted to find the relevant paper, and had to spend at least 10 minutes on Google trying to search between thousands of identical newspaper articles for the one paper that actually says anything about what was actually done.

More often than not, the paper is a lot less interesting than the newspaper article is making it out to be too.

citing is good for journalistic ethics, but linking is bad for search engine optimization -- at least this is what many websites seem to believe. the idea is that a link to an external source provides PageRank to that source that you could have provided to a different page on your website instead.

if anyone in the future tries to find X, as a journalist, you want them to find your article about X, not X itself. journalism is a profit-making business, not charity.

2ChristianKl2y

I don't think those groups of people are the only one who have an interest in being informed that's strong enough to read primary sources.

3Garrett Baker2y

Is it? That’s definitely what my English teacher wanted me to believe, but since every newspaper does it, all the time (except when someone Tweets something) I don’t see how it could be against journalistic ethics. Indeed, I think there’s a strong undercurrent in most mainstream newspapers that “the people” are not smart enough to evaluate primary sources directly, and need journalists & communicators to ensure they arrive at the correct conclusions.