NYT.com Adds Contextual Links

May 3, 2006

On this listing for an article about Stephen Colbert's awesome speech at the White House correspondent's dinner, the New York Times provides a link to the YouTube video of the event. It's nothing new for news sites to provide referencial links with an article, but this one is different.

The New York Times seems to be offering their readers the option of reading/viewing the piece in question before reading the commentary. It likely took guts to do this, but it's a great move. They're now saying, "it's okay if you weren't in on the joke before, but if you take a look now it'll be a lot more interesting."

Many companies would be afraid a constituent would go to the source media and not come back, which is a reasonable concern when your revenue is ad-based. NYT has admitted they're not the only site out there (and also doesn't seem to mind linking to copyrighted material posted without consent, which is another story all together) and understands that their readers are going to seek out this material anyway. By providing the links themselves, they're offering a better service. Similar arguments have been made in other contexts, but this is a great example of the theory in action.

I applaud the New York Times for doing this and I hope it sticks around.

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