This is my biggest pet peeve with news in general. Why does a high school paper have more rigor in terms of citations than the average post from a major news organization? It honestly drives me crazy.

How in the world can a majority of major news organizations not overcome the hurdle of... adding links to what they're covering..?

It makes digesting political news all but impossible.

I suspect there is motivation for a news organisation not to send users away from their website.

Probably because content outside of news websites is a lot more worth a read.

And often, but not always, actually contradicts the headline and/or the content of the "news" article itself.

>This is my biggest pet peeve with news in general. Why does a high school paper have more rigor in terms of citations than the average post from a major news organization?

Because news is not meant to inform, it's meant to indoctrinate and keep you passively under the thumb of the rich.

https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...

>It makes digesting political news all but impossible.

The question is do you know the upper classes know your brain doesn't see the world as it is, you can be told the facts and not reason to the right conclusion?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

One reason I heard, but have not verified, is that their content managements systems don't support links.

Pathetic, right?

It's even more infuriating when certain words have a link you would expect to be the source, but it turns out the link only leads to a sub-category of news about the word.

I was wondering the same and once when I asked someone who knows about the topic the answer was basically: Don't want to give free backlinks for SEO, don't want people to just scroll to the link and leave the site.

It might just be a policy to not add links except if it's to articles on the same site, which is obviously stupid from the user's point of view.

My pet peeve is when news organizations write about a court case (whether civil, like a lawsuit, or criminal) and forget to include (1) the court name and docket number so you can look up the status and filings yourself; (2) a copy of the latest filings to date (this can be harder to do depending on your platform).

Fwiw, I recently started writing for a well-known website.

When I asked if it's okay to link to sources, they told me I was allowed to if absolutely necessary. I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.

I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.

> I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.

> I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.

Not your fault, obviously, but FFS: this is the most vapid line of reasoning. If I want to find out more I'm going to leave your site anyway, so surely it's better if I'm not irritated by your lack of citations when I do inevitably go?

Does Wikipedia worry about people leaving and not coming back? No. Do you know why I go back to Wikipedia all the effing time, often using it as a starting point for research? Well, one of the big reasons is that many articles have a decent list of authoritative citations and external links at the bottom that I can use to find out more when I need or want to.

Talk about myopic: even the BBC do this, and it's incredibly frustrating. Absolutely smacks of some clueless senior manager[1] setting up the wrong metrics for measuring site performance.

[1] Manager bashing is a bit of a tired trope here on HN and I'm not trying to make a generalisation but, as with every job, some of them are certainly idiots/clowns.

You're probably an outlier. Most people are lazy (in particular, unlikely to embark on research projects), and accustomed to newspapers not citing sources (no hyperlinks in the dead-tree version, after all). They probably have data showing the rate at which people leave the site via external links.

You may be right, but people leaving the site isn't really the key metric here. The key metrics are ad and subscriber revenue: in this case particularly ad revenue.

If the reason they're leaving makes it's more likely they'll come back again in future this may lead to an increase in ad revenue due to more sessions even though average session duration falls.

Obviously I don't know, and unfortunately I've learned not to trust that higher-ups in certain organisations have done their homework on revenue-affecting decisions, but you'd at least hope that they had some data to back up the thinking.

Wikipedia’s business isn’t monetising people’s attention.

You've completely missed my point: if you want my attention you're more likely to get it for the longer term if you provide me with what I'm looking for, including citations, because I'll keep coming back. If on the other hand you're obstructive by not providing this, you probably won't. From a monetisation perspective it therefore makes sense to provide those citations.

Exactly! If a site gives me useful info and leads me to more, the site is much more likely to be the FIRST place I look for similar stuff next time. Otherwise they go on a mental blacklist and I never click on the links to that site in the first place.

Thus news should not be a business. The business model of news is diametrically opposed to informing the public. We’re better off sticking to nonprofit journalism.

Yet Wikipedia is the one creating actual economic value

It’s not very relevant to a story about eels, but the problem media has with primary sources, is that you can’t spin primary sources. They would rather have you read their editorial account of the primary source, rather than provide it to you, where there’s a greater risk of you making up for own mind about what to think of it.

It’s infuriating how true this seems to be. Especially in politics, so many big-name news sites across the entire political spectrum seem to consistently run stories that collapse instantly when checked.

How on earth do they still exist with a business model that seems to consist solely of making absurd interpretations of YouTube videos and tweets?