Why Don’t The New York Times (and Other News Organizations) Link Out to Sources More Often?

Like many other news organizations, The New York Times wrote about the recent high-profile resignations at Gawker (here’s the link), and like a few others, it chose not to link to the root of the Gawker upheaval, a story about a male escort’s attempts to blackmail a married media executive after discovering the executive had a famous brother. As the Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan explained in her blog post today, reasons for not linking had to do with Gawker pulling the original story as well as a desire to avoid exposing the name of a private individual — even indirectly through a link — whose privacy Times editors felt had been pointlessly violated.