Linking and News21

This story about data trails by the Northwestern Graduate School of Journalism is a good piece about Disney and its use of biometrics to track visitors to the park - Walt Disney World: the Government’s Tomorrowland?. But do you notice anything missing? I do. Links. The article, while very interesting and frightening in some ways, fails to take advantage of the Internet’s unique ability - the ability to link to other documents. Somewhat ironic, given that this is the News21 Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education (more information about the Medill project here).

As I have done previously, I decided to do a little experiment and go through the story looking for things I could link to.

Here are the links to home pages for organizations mentioned in the article:

That’s 11 outside sources for additional information that arguably should have been linked to in the story. And this is not even a list of the government organizations mentioned in the article, like the CIA, FBI, DHS, and State Department, or sites for individuals quoted in the article. All of the above links were found using Google or Yahoo search, a process that took all of 15 minutes from beginning the search to putting the links into this article. Interestingly, Arnold Tang, the “theme park consultant” mentioned at the top of the story, was almost non-existent in Google or Yahoo searches. There are no links to other resources on biometrics on this page. These are simple things to improve through the use of this formula:

<a xhref= “http://www.yoursitehere.com “>this is a link</a>.

Again, the purpose of this is not to diss the writers for their reporting on the issue, but to point out the shortcomings of the presentation of this material in a web-based environment. The story looks like “shovelware.” There are some interesting examples of multimedia presentations on other parts of the News21 web site (see the Berkeley package here, for instance), but the first and primary unique quality of the Web is interconnectivity - not video (which is a quality shared with TV) or audio (which is a quality shared with radio) or words (which is a quality shared with books, newspapers, and magazines).
reminded of this via Institute for Analytic Journalism

And for previous discussion of the News21 Initiative, see Mark Glaser: Digging Deeper: News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different? and Len Witt and Mindy McAdams.

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