I'm Willing to Give The Benefit of the Doubt to That Double-click Dictionary Experiment

This is a news story in the New York Times. Of the six links in this screenshot, the first five go to other, non-NYT sites that provide more information about the linked text. The Project Excelsior link goes to the national Museum of the US Air Force’s ‘Fact Sheet’ on the project. The last link goes to a special topic-specific page (that looks partially hand-edited) about NASA. Given that NASA is insanely familiar to everyone and sources of information about it are widely available and well-known, I think there are a strong editorial and usability arguments for linking to this NYT page.

Not a single one of these links is something like nyt.com/tag/space or nyt.com/search/project+excelsior. They are giving up cheap-ass Gawker Media pageviews for increased journalistic quality.

I feel like I rag on the New York Times a lot, and everyone else on the internet rags on them too about other stuff (personally, I think the idea of selling the news is a totally reasonable thing to try), but a lot of the web end of the paper is really top-notch, and this is an example. This story looks like it was in the paper edition as well, so some online editor probably had to go back and supply all those links (unless the journos do that in their copy now?).

In summary, good job New York Times!