Historic Boston: Things to Do on the 4th
OddBlotter: Ain't That America
Bite Size News, July 3: Cars and Crashes Edition
Sports Redux: Bottoms Up For Seattle
The piece was a nightmare of disorganization. Globe reporter David Abel penned an article in today's Globe Magazine about the cop who hit a baby stroller in a JP intersection, a story that Bostonist broke in August. Abel's piece is sort of about blogs, er, "increasingly popular echo chambers [that] have provided a means for those long walled off from one another in siloed lives to search for answers," and it's sort of about the incident itself—he can't quite make up his mind. (Quickly: the cop got a slap on the wrist; the child seems to be doing okay; the internet rumor mongers made life in JP unlivable for the mom, who has since moved to Newton and is looking to buy in the suburbs.) The online version of the piece, which cites Bostonist as well as the "more widely read" Universal Hub and the JP Moms mailing list, doesn't contain a single hyperlink. The house style at Boston.com reportedly doesn't allow them, but, as one Bostonist noted, "this is one of those cases in which it's crazy not to link, or at least to give a full domain name. If they denounced a book I suspect they'd at least give the barest of bibliographic citations (author, publisher, year)."
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
Where did you get your information that the Boston.com style guide doesn't allow linking off of the site? I used to work there, (I don't anymore, and it wasn't in any of the content divisions even when I had) but have never heard of that being policy.
Certain globe reporters (like Jeff Jacoby in http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/28/franks_fingerprints_are_all_over_the_financial_fiasco/ have plenty of links. Articles that explicitly mention a web site or URL like http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2008/07/05/a_bitter_tasting_jolt_for_starbucks/ link off site too. So it doesn't seem to be policy, but perhaps effort. (You can't click on dead trees, so there is no need to add links for the Boston Globe itself. When the Globe content is put on Boston.com, someone would have to get URLs from authors and the text to hyperlink and then re-edit add them to every article.)
I'm not saying that the work shouldn't be done, but their editors can make that decision on where to spend their time. I'd prefer that they start their effort by fixing up the article correctly, and not leave it hanging with "COLLISION COURSE The Jamaica Plain intersection where the patrol wagon struck the mother and her toddler." Either add the graphic to the article, or remove the headline and caption for it.
Ah, we stand corrected. Boston.com's editorial team just has a bad case of the lazies. Thanks, Ami!
You could either think of it that way, or you could consider that the demands of maintaining a site that adds more than 2000 new pages a day might be more than you'd think. I have to say that I've made both arguments at times.
The demands of maintaining a site that adds more than 2000 new pages a day doesn't seem to deter other newspaper webpages (including mothership NYTimes) from adding hyperlinks to articles. Perhaps lazy is uncharitable; maybe the website is just poorly managed.
a nice article about blogging from andrew sullivan: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog (no links, sadly). some of it:
"To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism, bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers. Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup. The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness... To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth... [W]riting in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs. The links not only drive conversation, they drive readers. The more you link, the more others will link to you, and the more traffic and readers you will get... [B]logging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective."
"[B]logging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.""
is that really a flaw - I thought it was a part of life - doesn't figuring these things out make it that much more interesting to be human - notably one would argue that Truth is not out there but in there and it is as fleeting and ethereal as a wisp of cloud
Speaking of truth - here is a link for you
"
LINK: In case embedding doesn't work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNIkeG17O5U
Happy Halloweeeeeeen
But the blogs were more accurate than the Globe in this case. Just sayin'.