When you’re wielding the power to influence society, you’ve got an obligation to deliver the truth at all costs. My fellow journalists, we’ve got to do better.

I’m talking about the amount of hyperlinks found in an average news article, or rather the lack there of. We now have the ability to deliver entire documents in a report, without clouding the understanding by making it more complex. Instead of just listing sources, we can provide a colorfully underlined road map pointing directly to the information itself. We have these tools, and yet, we do not use them often enough.

The utter lack of outbound hyperlinking in traditional written reporting struck me as something more than the usual annoyance after reading a comment from Muhammad Saleem (Mu) on my twitter feed. Mu pointed out the “arrogance” of a particular article on technology news web site Ars Technica because it did not contain a single outbound link. There were links to certain pieces of information in this article, but they were all pointing to previous reports done on their own site. Still, that’s a large leap forward compared to straight text with vague attribution.

Mu, who leads the discussion of social media on a variety of sites [MuhammadSaleem.com Read/WriteWeb and more] was kind enough to elaborate via instant messenger: “Until 6 months ago, [Old media] didn’t link to anything at all. It was like the paper copy pasted online.” And he’s absolutely correct.

Even now, with newspapers rigorously adapting practices from a decade ago, its still absurdly common to read articles on the Internet that behave no differently than a printed copy. Not even simple references that list the URL itself are not functional hyperlinks. This kind of behavior is one part lazy, two parts “arrogance” (as Mu said) — and not just because they failed to add a link. The people inside those editorial staffs would much rather point out your poor verb tenses and ill-placed commas than insert HTML code inside of a story, which takes time and effort since you’re writing content for two separate mediums.

“It shows that you’re drawing from other sources that agree with you, gives you credibility. Plus you have to attribute all non-original research,” Mu says. It’s difficult to make an argument against this kind of logic, since it would strengthen the information and in turn the reporting itself. Yet, somehow traditional editorial staffs have demonstrated that it’s unnecessary to bother with linking to outside research. “That’s their Achilles’ Heel, they just don’t know it yet.”

It’s improbable that a journalist with little to no prior knowledge of a subject he or she is writing about, will be the most qualified person to deliver a report by relaying information from unseen, unexamined and unheard sources. And while there is something to be said for this process serving the free press astoundingly well during the printing press era, it would be down right arrogant to assume future reporting will remain credible without attributing a link for every piece of information.