Follow the links

By: Callie McBroom

Daniel Luzer from the Columbia Journalism Review is Linked Out. He recently decided to follow the hyperlinks in various stories for a whole day.

Luzer was interested to see if hyperlinks are an incidental addition to news, or actually changing the way people consume information. He began his experiment on Oct. 15, the day after the last presidential debate.

He felt that hyperlinking made it very hard to finish reading any articles. Also, the parts of different articles he did read were distracting and didn't really relate.

Luzer discovered that different media organizations have different strategies for hyperlinking. Many use corporate media hyperlinks, which link the reader to other pages within the site. He points out that these links avoided distracting the reader, which ended up boring the reader.

Even though Luzer felt that he knew what was going on, he stressed that he didn't really understand what was going on. He also felt overwhelmed with keeping up with the news.

In the end, Luzer found that many of the articles he read just weren't that good. He says, "If journalists don’t really know anything, they can’t link their way around the problem."