Journalism needs hyperlinks
...

2020-11-10 and 2020-11-28

Since writing the post below, it's has been brought to my attention by Maxwell Powell, on 2020-11-11, that the void I'm speaking about is partially filled by www.democracydocket.com.

It's November 10th, 2020, and we find ourselves in the interesting position of having all major media outlets, including Fox, using the term "President-Elect" to describe Joe Biden. But President Trump, on Twitter, is insisting at great length in his inimitable way that shenanigans are afoot, and news outlets are reporting that the Trump campaign is filing a number of lawsuits.

No doubt you are aware of all this, and I have no intention of trying to talk you out of whatever it is that you believe about it. (I think Biden won the election, for what it's worth.) But I could not help but notice that something is missing in the news coverage I'm seeing. Well, that's not completely true. There's something my brother Maxwell couldn't help but notice missing in all the news coverage he's seeing. Today's journalism, as usual, is missing hyperlinks.

When Tim Berners-Lee put up the first modern website, back in 1989, the one nifty little feature that made the whole thing fresh and new and exciting was the hyperlinks. You could be reading one document, click on a little bit of blue text, and suddenly find yourself reading another document. No doubt you know all about this already, but I'm describing the phenomenon just in case you happen to be a journalist at a major news outlet, in which case it will most likely be news to you that the internet isn't just a way of simulating paper on a screen.

Below are links to a number of the lawsuits that are currently -- depending on who you ask -- either wasting the time of various judges or on the verge of blowing the lid off the vast conspiracy.

One thing all those links have in common is that you will not find them in major news sources. And it's not a matter of left-wing bias -- you won't find them on Donald Trump's twitter page either, for the most part. In fact, you usually won't even find the names of the cases in major news outlets. I personally read more political news than most people I know, but I wouldn't have stumbled onto these by accident. Maxwell, though, went hunting for them, and spent a couple of hours finding them.

He put in some effort, and he found what he was looking for. There's nothing wrong with putting in some effort. But the unfortunate thing is that many other curious people are also, most likely, doing the same hunt, resulting in lots of duplicated effort.

When it comes to tracking down the links to the lawsuits referenced in high-profile stories, this is something where one person willing to put in about an hour a day of volunteer labor could make a dent. I don't want to put an hour a day into it, but maybe you will. Here's what you could do.

Set up a Google News alert, or alternative method you prefer, for the word "lawsuit". Each day, you'll get a few prominent news stories that reference lawsuits. Then you could spend a half hour or so trying to find some of those lawsuits, pop them into a daily blog post, and shoot off a brief update to the internet of the day's most prominent lawsuit-related stories and the lawsuits that link to them. You wouldn't need to analyze the lawsuits, understand them, or say clever things about them. You'd just need to find them. If you want to put in an extra fifteen minutes a day, you could head off to twitter and taunt the journalists who failed to include the links themselves.

Over the course of a year or two, you'd have 365 or 730 posts, and you'd have built up a pretty useful and searchable website collecting the newsworthy lawsuits of the last year or two. Perhaps your taunts on twitter will have taught some journalists what href means. You might even become as famous as @justsaysinmice.

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Journalism needs hyperlinks