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October 7, 2017 12:00 am

'Our Addiction To Links is Making Good Journalism Harder To Read'

The building blocks of the web have become its intellectual Achilles' heel, Quartz reports. Links have turned against us, and they're making it impossible to read and learn. From a report: I know, you got here via a link. Links are crucial for navigation and seem instinctively useful to journalism. But when they're embedded within an article that should be a calm, focused learning experience, they are a gateway to distraction and information addiction. A 2005 study suggested that "increased demands of decision-making and visual processing" in text with links reduced reading comprehension -- a challenge we face every day as we try to parse the web's infinite information. Last week, one of my favorite publications ran a thoughtful, well-written article that I could barely read. It contained 57 links in less than 2,000 words. Today, the top five articles on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal averaged a link every 197 words -- that's one link for every minute of reading. Since the advent of the written word, there's only been one reason to change the color, style or weight of text: emphasis. Your eye is trained to pause and assign added importance to any word that carries a different style than the words before it. A great article deserves focus, and it's almost impossible to achieve any level of focus when random words are emphasized for no reason other than their association with a previous article or the fact that they refer to an outside resource. Read the full story on Quartz.

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