August 19, 2002, 2:01 PM ET
Automated technology gone wrong
Forgot to mention something about the New York Times article I highlighted in today's lunchtime links. This article serves as an example of automated technology gone wrong. In the second-to-last graf, the word Northwestern (in "The Daily Northwestern") is linked to a company profile on Northwestern Corp. Clearly nytimes.com automatically links any occurrence of the word "Northwestern" to that company profile page. Silly inaccuracies like these damage a news site's credibility. An irrelevant link is just as bad as a misspelled word in a headline.
How would nytimes.com staff members fix such an error? Does their content-management system allow producers to bypass the auto-linking for a particular story? That'd be an easy fix. If not, I fear the only other possible solution, short of turning off the auto-linking sitewide, would be to rewrite the story so that the word "Northwestern" wasn't included. I doubt they'd go that far, but this is an interesting case of journalists being at the mercy of imperfect technology.
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