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Comment by jonathanberger | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why reporters or publications seem to refuse to link to the most obvious and central key piece of material to an article.

Article on a new law being passed... no link to the raw text of the law. Article about a new scientific study that has come out... ofcourse, no link to the study. Famous person issues a statement or makes a speech... sure, we'll give you a few quotes but no link to the full text.

It's like, come on!

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>I still don't get why reporters or publications seem to refuse to link to the most obvious and central key piece of material to an article.

Because people would click the link and leave the article/news website as soon as possible, since the link will probably have more pertinent information than the drivel on bloomberg. Or, they're just that dense.

journalists also like to maintain their status as gatekeepers of information

I suspect this is the primary reason. This happened before the internet too -- articles never include full references to their public sources -- not because a reader could just switch to reading the source (you couldn't before the internet) but because they want to maintain their power over the reader as their authoritative source of information and make sure they come back. The world is full of people looking for gates they can lock, monopolies they can secure (natural or otherwise), regulations they can capture, and gardens they can build walls around; journalism isn't exempt.

This relates to my other peeve: trying to find the original video when something goes viral. Let's say I hear that Alice was seen telling Carol secrets about Bob. I go to Google/DDG/Youtube and search "Carol Alice secrets Bob" and get several dozen video results. ALL of them are other people trying to repackage the original video with their own commentary. News sites, bloggers, etc.

How do I locate the OG footage?

Agreed. But if the original video was posted on a paywalled site then I would be looking at another site for it. So what I think it is, is that we want immediate access to the information we need to make are own judgement in this case a video. Then maybe we want to read some commentary. Most sites try force the commentary in your face coupled with adds before you find the actual video.

I remember putting a feature request that Google append to the video description the original source. But then you devolve into the whole authenticity realm like with Twitter verified badges.

For certain things sorting by time is the easiest way to test for authenticity. It doesn't always work but it's usually the easiest way. This feels like a problem that Google should be able to solve, with their web crawler and video/photo recognition capabilities.

Oh for sure. I know it can be tricky to make that decision. Having some advanced search tools would help me do it on my own. What if I could see the results, and tell Google to show me the earliest video that has a runtime between x:xx and y:yy and is visually similar to a chosen result? With at least 50,000 views?

Maybe filter out all results posted by media orgs. Or show only those results that don't have cuts in them (almost all original footage is a continuous shot of a situation, with no titles, cuts to reporters or anchors, or introductions)

I think I'm headed down a rabbit trail of leveraging ContentID smarts for better searching and filtering.

That's exactly what we built internally. Not only a capability to identify the original video, but which portions of it are being shared the most, what's the most popular video, etc.

Technical challenge is one thing, but getting people to choose some random search engine over Google is incredibly hard, as Google spends billions of dollars to divert all the traffic to themselves.

Because Bloomberg articles are for Apple investors, not Apple customers.

TechCrunch, for example, not only has links to the privacy pages, but has a screen shot of what the page looks like. That page also links to another separate page that shows exactly how to download your data.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/apple-privacy-pages-data-a...

I should actually say:

"Because Bloomberg articles are for <some company's> investors, not <some company's> customers"

It would also seem appropriate for Bloomberg to link Google and Facebooks export features - I'm not sure why this is a story about Apple with no reference to others who have offered this for a long time. Otherwise it seems more like a paid article to promote a feature.

> I still don't get why reporters or publications seem to refuse to link to the most obvious and central key piece of material to an article.

They don't like to "advertise" other companies and get traffic out of their sites.

I remember, many years ago, when I was doing some freelance web development, one of the customers didn't want to put a link to his Facebook page on his website, because "we won't be advertising Facebook for free".

Yelling at them got the BBC to fix this. Of course they (in the UK at least) are just providing a service, not trying to maximise advertising exposure.

They were even moderately effective at teaching journalists to write links in a natural style, ie not telling readers to "click here" or putting everything in numbered footnotes like it's still the 1980s

Probably SEO. They don't want the other page rank higher in Google than their article, so they don't pass link juice.

Would rel=nofollow work in that case? Makes me sad, but I'll let it go if they just put something there.

I don't think so. In this case not linking to the privacy page is likely just an oversight from Bloomberg.

Other publications that do this want to rank for the keywords they are linking to—those words are a vote for the internal article that is being linked. Just look up any Verge article about the Pixel 3. All the keywords link to other internal articles.

They should add links and use words like Original Source or Original Video—less valuable keywords, that would still be helpful to readers. They could even nofollow those.

It's about engagement. They want you to click another article, another section, etc, while remaining on their property. Every link away is a potential loss of further reading, and is competition for your attention.

Modern journalism is about controlling what you think. If you read the source material yourself, you would form your own opinions instead of the ones they want to give you.

Unlike old journalism, which wasn't about that at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

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