August 12, 2009

Oops! LA Times Forgets Reason It Has Website

IN THIS WEEK's heralded redesign of the LA Times website, one thing's forgotten: deep links. In its new design the paper neglected to keep old URLs, like the ones for articles blogs like mine link to all the time. In fact it seems the paper seems to have retired the latimesblogs.latimes.com address and its accompanying LA Now blog, perhaps the Times' best online news effort. No redirects, either. Aren't inbound links still important, LAT? Isn't this one of the top reasons news organizations have websites in the first place? So next time you see a "host not accessible" blank page when clicking through from my blog to an old LA Times article, you know whom to blame...

UPDATE: The LA Times blogs seem to be coming and going. After I wrote this, they were back up. Today, they're back down.

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