The actual reason links to studies are often left off articles (particularly in cases like this with sharp deadline pressure to publish fast before the competition) is that the software powering the editing and publishing workflow really badly needs improvement. An incredible amount of work and knowledge goes into a story like this.
Versioning rich text through many different software tools designed for writing/editing and publishing across many platforms is hard. Sometimes people copy/paste by hand and in doing so a link can go missing. The news industry needs more technologists to work on these problems. We're hiring for people to do that, by the way: http://developers.nytimes.com/careers/
(Also, the link to the study is now in.)
Now I don't want it to sound dismissive or personal in any way, but tell me - if say, few of great software devs now drop everything they do and come to NYT to help, sit down for months and develop the most awesome software package the world of press has ever seen, will it actually solve the quality issues articles have? And more importantly, if sold to other papers, will it suddenly solve their problems?
Will it make journalism honest and trustworthy instead of lies and clickbait bullshit?
I'm not sure how much blame to put on broken publishing workflow, a lot of this seems really to be about broken incentives - "deadline pressure to publish fast before the competition" that leads to the "many articles, as sensationalist as possible, truth be damned" mentality, especially in the management layer.
But you did give me a pause here. Only recently I had a chance to peek at internals of a tiny part of manufacturing industry, and oh boy how much money they waste on badly designed software, which is badly designed because of deadline pressure and top management pressuring to iterate over a broken software package (and then messing with the process) instead of scrapping it altogether and doing it right. Maybe software is more to blame than I thought.
This actually happened and that's how we got d3.js. It didn't fix journalism though.
You get what you pay for, which online tends toward nothing.
Still, it's better than them getting paid to tell you what someone else wants you to hear.
My objection is with the editorials. I've all but stopped reading "the news" (NYT, WSJ, Economist, my local paper, etc) as a result.
"I don't like [thing]" "I work at [thing], come help me fix it"
(Not claiming that NY Times is perfect. Of course. There are other good sources, too. But NYTimes isn't like the media I grew up with. At 20 I realized that all their coverage of subjects which I knew beyond the surface was garbage, at best. My specific example is DN, the largest Swedish morning paper, but could be most of the media.)
I'd be happy to be corrected of course.
I'm skeptical of this "software" explanation. Software can of course make citation management much easier, but I see lots of articles that don't even bother to mention the lead author of a cited publication; and how did the software get that way in the first place? The software reflects the priorities of the corrupt organization that produced it.
Somebody could probably sit down with the journalists for few weeks and come up with a software package that would fit their needs perfectly - if the development consisted of direct communication between the developers and journalists/editorial staff, without any management middlemen in between. Alas, that's not how software is procured in large organizations.
But I'm also skeptical. It could explain NYT's problems, but it doesn't explain the even worse problems every other news outlet has.
NOTE: Study "Effects of X on Y given XYZ" by Researcher N. Here, http://address-to-paper.org
(not the placeholder, the actual data) should help. I don't see such a line getting lost, and even if they happen to publish it by accident instead of incorporating into the text (as sometimes happens, things slip through), it would still reach the same goal anyway.
Sounds like the problem lies here and not on the technical side of writing, editing and publishing text.
I wonder what part of this decadence is imputable to ad revenu. If I were very naive, I would say all of it.
You can wish it weren't so, or call it cynical, but that IS the reason they don't add a link to the source in the article. God help us all if people clicked away from the site, learned more about the topic than the reporter, or had the piece go over their head.
I find your comment disheartening because I was kind of hoping that I was guessing wrong. Can I still hope that things are not quite as bad at the NY Times as at local weeklies?
http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe...
Where he talks about encouraging outgoing traffic.
But one of the more interesting links in that post has gone "evil-dark" (expired, taken by squatters, endless unclosable javascript "your iOS app is inf1ected!!1one! Call us to fix it! Have your credit card ready!"
So by your newspaper linking only to itself, it could be that they actually hope to avoid this dead link behavior. (Although it would be better that it was a self link that went to a vetted link repository.)
I'm really not a web guy, so I'm surprised that this problem hasn't been solved for most content management systems.