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April 11, 2011
When to hyperlink within an online news story?By Robert Niles
That's a question that challenges even the most experienced online writers. Hyperlinks imbue a news story with the power of the World Wide Web, allowing writers to source information, explain detail and provide depth in ways unique to the medium.
Hyperlinks also allow writers to clutter stories, and to distract and mislead readers away from the narrative of the piece. No wonder that many writers ignore hyperlinks, leaving them to automated scripts in the site's content management system, or a lame list of (sort of, maybe) "related links" at a post's end, selected by an online editor who wasn't included in the process until the very end.
Professor Ronald Yaros of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism has completed a study that offers online journalists and educators a bit of needed guidance on when, and when not, to use hyperlinks in a news story. (Read the rest of the story on the Knight Digital Media Center website).
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