This may seem trivial for most, but I have lamented the use of generic uses of refers to our website before..

Today we moved one small step towards where we need to be by using a bit.ly link in the paper. The link was to an op-ed piece in the Times and Democrat in Orangeburg.

The whole discussion that evening was based around the argument of “We need to drive traffic to our website, so we’re going to say ‘For this link, visit thestate.com.’”

To begin with, I can’t say how wrong this thinking is. Let’s make it as easy as possible for readers to find supporting info. To support my argument, I used another link that was used on B1 to an external link as well.

I can understand how this might happen in print, but this would never happen online. Would anyone say ‘to see these documents, go find this story on latimes.com?’ NO! They wouldn’t they would link directly to the documents themselves.

If you think about it, this is a great example of control and education. On the one hand we have someone who wants to do things the way they’ve always been done. On the other hand we need to educate them that their are better ways of doing things. I know this is a long and complicated process, but we’ve got to start somewhere.