Comment by Havoc
8 hours ago
It's unfortunately not a case of bothering but rather intent: Keep the user on the site even at cost of quality
8 hours ago
It's unfortunately not a case of bothering but rather intent: Keep the user on the site even at cost of quality
I would in general agree with you, but having read through the journal paper: I think the fraction of general audience newspaper readers who could actually read that paper is very low. I come from a science background, spent time dabbling in time and frequency measurement enough to understand some of the concepts, and still found it a painful slog. (I am very much not a physicist!)
I still think it's the right practice for newspapers to always link to the primary source, but in this particular case I understand why they might make an editorial decision not to.
This is actually very rare for the New York Times - they're the only major publication that regularly links to the original sources.
Is there evidence that is the actual reasoning, because I find it ridiculous. People who don’t care about the primary source are not going to follow a link to, e.g., a court ruling, government report, fed minutes, a leaked document, a research paper, etc; but those who are interested are going to immediately leave the site and likely not come back for a long while.
Am I missing something?
And how many people could actually understand that paper? Anyone who could would find it easily enough.
That's not a reason for omitting the link to the original source. If anything, it would help illustrate the value of science journalism/reporting.
You're looking for evidence that providing external links might lead to users visiting those external links? I'm not sure what you're doubting here, it's a pretty typical "web user behavior", if you've ran a website before. Any exit points you provide leads to more users leaving at those points.
The KPIs these websites use to measure "how good an article is" is (among other things) how long time people "spend" on the article. Remove all external links, and it'll at least look like people engage for longer with the content. Does it make sense? No, but won't stop the people who run the business to believe so.