NYTimes Prefers Silly to Serious

The New York Times does a lot of things right online. Multimedia, lists of what stories are being searched, e-mailed, blogged. It also does a lot of things wrong, like the Times Select paywall, but chief among them is it's refusal to "pollute" the purity of the Grey Lady with outside links. This arrogance is, of course, a product of the archaic "All the News That's Fit to Print" mindset. If it's not in the Times, it's not worth knowing.

The absurdity of this thinking was revealed last week when Tom Friedman wrote a column in response to a letter from GM having to do with his thinking on global warming. Of course, this being the Times, there was no link to the letter, so you're reading the column in the dark.

Today, the flip-side of the no outside links policy is even more silly. The Times forces intrasite links inside its story to pages summarizing the paper's coverage. So, in it's piece on the Warren Buffet's boffo donations, where it refers to him as the Oracle of Omaha? You guessed it, Oracle is hot-linked to a page of Times coverage of the Redwood City software maker.

That just makes the Times look silly.