> What do your editors, or you as editors, as the case may be, think of 
> linking to advertisements and advertisors' sites from words in 
> editorial copy?

In a word: ugh.

>From the standpoint of editorial independnce (yeah, yeah, that 
still exists somewhere, right?), it bites. I hope I don't have to 
expand on that, but anybody who's come from an environment in which 
the ad staff are given mean glares (at a minimum) if they dare 
venture into the newsroom will know what I mean.

But even if you take the stance that information is information, 
whether it comes from the newsroom or the ad department, it's still 
weak. So you write a story about, oh, how Netscape is going to wipe 
Microsoft off the Internet map. "Internet" is hotlinked to 
Microsoft's site. And??? Where does the user go from there?  Now if 
you linked him to, say, a Microsoft white paper on their Internet 
strategy, at least that might possibly add something to the story 
beyond mere shilldom. And if the story is a negative one about the 
vendor, are they going to WANT a link to their Web site? More 
important, as an advertiser, are they going to demand that the story 
be pulled? 

For the record, Network World does link users from stories to vendor 
sites where appropriate.  But that remains an editorial decision, 
when we decide the given document (technical specs for a some box 
we're writing about, say) will really add to the reader's
perspective. One thing we don't do is simply send somebody to a 
vendor home page (except in those cases when the home page itself is 
the subject of the story).



Adam Gaffin
Online Editor, Network World
agaffin@nww.com / (508) 820-7433
"So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will
emerge as the information superhighway." - Bob Metcalfe

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End of online-news-digest V1 #524
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From owner-online-news-digest@marketplace.com Wed Feb 21 13:51:46 1996
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