Let’s play find the link
Crawl through this Consumerist post. It heavily block quotes another news source; in fact it’s apparent that no original reporting was done by the Gawker Media site.
So who did the original reporting? If you squint really hard you’ll see a link buried at the bottom with the alluring anchor text of “[SOURCE]”
Gawker Media isn’t even trying to pretend anymore like it has any desire to send traffic to other sites.
This touches upon another pet peeve of mine. When linking to someone, refer to the person who wrote the original article by name. NYTIMES didn’t report something. Thomas Friedman did (etc…).
Of course, in the blogging world where bloggers have cute/noncute monikers (Camworld, Easter Lemming Liberal, Daily Kos), it is sometimes hard to figure out who actually wrote the article. That is a bad thing too.
Unless your name is shielded to prevent political reprisals, I see no reason why linkers can’t refer to the person who actually wrote the article.
Economist (and CNN too I think) have popularized the no-byline news article.