“Just be happy with the visibility” is getting pretty old as newspaper subscription rates are at record lows. But as I said, I am happy with that. That’s a cool thing. I’m not “just” happy with because I think that the journalism industry is ignoring something important.

There is a link economy that Google and the search engines have created and that we all live in. The way my website can rise above the others is from other websites linking to it in a way that gives it credibility. This newspaper story is credibility, but the lack of a link prevents me from getting benefits in that economy.

I’m just sharing with you the relative worth I put on the type of visibility we get from the press. Ignoring the benefits that website owners see in a hyperlink is important.

It’s the web equivalent of not citing the source of a quote, and just like if you persistently failed to quote people, they care less about talking to you.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to the former business editor of a major daily newspaper. He was building a site and unsure of the importance of keywords to today’s journalists. Had I not asked whether the paper demanded keyword relevance for their web-based content, I would assumed that they all knew.

So that’s just keywords.

Furthermore, other dailies are knowledgeable about keywords and links but have editorial policies – currently very meager – about the issue.

But you’re right about the gift horse: just enjoy the visibility. If folks are interested, they’ll visit. I’d rather get highly targeted visits than PR.

I’ve had to manually clean up and process 200+ articles in a .brs or .txt file into a .html file, and the priority was having the stuff come out quickly and cleaning up any formatting anomalies along the way. Graphics and linking out usually wasn’t the priority (even though it might be pretty easy to add a macro then added a “<a href=http://…" into the mix.

In my opinion, it's more the fault of the process, and educating the industry vs the reporter being able to embed links into the article when they submit (which might mess up the formatting for the print editing) as it goes to whatever layout software they might be using.

I’m sure the reasons are varied though.

Or maybe the Staten Island paper didn’t want to give link love to a Sox/Pats fan.