The New York Times reports today on the launch of a service by Inform.com that enables news sites to automatically link to related stories.

Newspapers have long been reluctant to link to other sites for fear of losing traffic. Never mind that Google built a $117B business primarily by linking to other sites.

It irks me whenever a news story refers to online content without a reference.

The wire services, which provide much of the content on newspapers and news sites, do a terrible job. Take this AFP story about a woman kicked off a Cathay Pacific flight for refusing to stow a Gucci purse. The last paragraph says:

“The incident, captured on camera by another passenger and published on the Internet, resulted in a delay of the flight of more than an hour.”

There is no URL anywhere in the story. I’ve searched flickr and YouTube with no luck.