[supernova87a]

By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story. (and another user here kindly did that for us below: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... )

It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the ruling PDF to write the story) yet why is it always such a hassle for them to feel that they should link the original content? I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point. It feels like they want to be the gatekeepers of information, and poor ones at that.

I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.

Aside from that, it will be interesting to see on what grounds the judge decided that this particular data sharing remedy was the solution. Can anyone now simply claim they're a competitor and get access to Google's tons of data?

I am not too familiar with antitrust precedent, but to what extent does the judge rule on how specific the data sharing need to be (what types of data, for what time span, how anonymized, etc. etc.) or appoint a special master? Why is that up to the judge versus the FTC or whoever to propose?

[Hard_Space]

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read right in the story.

I presume that this falls under the same consideration as direct links to science papers in articles that are covering those releases. Far as I can tell, the central tactic for lowering bounce rate and increasing 'engagement' is to link out sparsely, and, ideally, not at all.

I write articles on new research papers, and always provide a direct link to the PDF,; but nearly all major sites fail to do this, even when the paper turns out to be at Arxiv, or otherwise directly available (instead of having been an exclusive preview offered to the publication by the researchers, as often happens at more prominent publications such as Ars and The Register).

In regard to the few publishers that do provide legal PDFs in articles, the solution I see most often is that the publication hosts the PDF itself, keeping the reader in their ecosystem. However, since external PDFs can get revised and taken down, this could also be a countermeasure against that.

[mike_hearn]

They didn't cited papers directly even before the web. It's not a bounce or engagement issue.

Journalists don't make it easy for you to access primary sources because of a mentality and culture issue. They see themselves as gatekeepers of information and convince themselves that readers can't handle the raw material. From their perspective, making it easy to read primary sources is pure downside:

• Most readers don't care/have time.

• Of the tiny number who do, the chances of them finding a mistake in your reporting or in the primary source is high.

• It makes it easier to mis-represent the source to bolster the story.

Eliminating links to sources is pure win: people care a lot about mistakes but not about finding them, so raising the bar for the few who do is ideal.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Articles about patent infringement are similarly annoying when the patent numbers aren't cited. This is basic 21st century journalism 101. We aren't limited to what fits on a broadside anymore.

We need an AI driven extension that will insert the links. This would be a nice addition to Kagi as they could be trusted to not play SEO shenanigans.

[chneu]

I don't read science/tech articles from major news outlets for this reason. They NEVER link to the papers and I always have to spend a few minutes searching for it.

This doesn't happen nearly as often on smaller sci/tech news outlets. When it does a quick email usually gets the link put in the article within a few hours.

[AlienRobot]

It's depressing how much of the web didn't work the way it was supposed to. Attention is centralized on news websites because news can be posted on social media feeds every day. Those news articles never link to other websites due to arbitrary SEO considerations. Google's pagerank which was once based on backlinks can't function if the only links come from social media feeds in 3 websites and none of them come from actual websites. On top of it all, nobody even knows for sure if those SEO considerations matter or not because it's all on Google's whim and can change without notice.

[bawolff]

I think one of the lessons of Wikipedia, is the more you link out the more they come back.

People come to your site because it is useful. They are perfectly capable of leaving by themselves. They don't need a link to do so. Having links to relavent information that attracts readers back is well worth the cost of people following links out of your site.

[mbs159]

When it comes to providing direct links to PDFs of scientific papers, you can often run into paywall issues. Court decisions / rulings on the other hand do not belong to any publishers, so it's a different story

[Workaccount2]

Never link outside your domain has been rule #1 of the ad-driven business for years now.

Once users leave your page, they become exponentially less likely to load more ad-ridden pages from your website.

Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop). This Google story will get a lot of clicks. But it is easy to see a near future where an AI agent just retrieves and summarizes the case for you. And does a much better job too.

[bc569a80a344f9c]

> But it is easy to see a near future where an AI agent just retrieves and summarizes the case for you. And does a much better job too.

I am significantly less confident that an LLM is going to be any good at putting a raw source like a court ruling PDF into context and adequately explain to readers why - and what details - of the decision matter, and what impact they will have. They can probably do an OK job summarizing the document, but not much more.

I do agree that given current trends there is going to be significant impact to journalism, and I don’t like that future at all. Particularly because we won’t just have less good reporting, but we won’t have any investigative journalism, which is funded by the ads from relatively cheap “reporting only” stories. There’s a reason we call the press the fourth estate, and we will be much poorer without them.

There’s an argument to be made that the press has recently put themselves into this position and hasn’t done a great job, but I still think it’s going to be a rather great loss.

[supernova87a]

I guess they are unable to value the function that I am more likely to read and trust stories from their website if they give me the honest info about where their stories come from that I can further read (and rely on them to always point me to as a guide).

[upcoming-sesame]

This is one of the practices I hate the most on the internet.

Sometimes it's so ridiculous that a news site will report about some company and will not have a single link to the company page or will have a link that just points to another previous article about that company.

How fuxking insecure are you ??

[nradov]

Most of that stuff like court decisions and patents isn't copyrighted anyway. They can host a copy on their own site and display ads around it if they want to.

[vkou]

> And does a much better job too.

A much better job for who? For you, or the firm running it?

A future where humans turn over all their thinking to machines, and, by proxy, to the people who own those machines is not one to celebrate.

[coro_1]

> Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop).

Maybe.. not. LLMs may just flow where the money goes. Open AI has a deal with the FT, etc.

The AI platforms haven't touched any UI devolution at all because they're a hot commodity.

[camillomiller]

And you think that’s better? The Llm will be unbiased how, exactly?

[szszrk]

That is my primitive way of distinguishing actual journalism and honest blogging from ad-crap and paywall traps.

If they actually link to other websites and their sources - it's worth my time. If they don't - it's a honeypot.

[nkurz]

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story.

I have the same peeve, but to give credit where it is due, I've happily noticed that Politico has lately been doing a good job of linking the actual decisions. I just checked for this story, and indeed the document you suggest is linked from the second paragraph: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/02/google-dodges-a-2-5...

[rafram]

I’ve noticed this in New York Times articles in the last couple years. Articles are heavily interlinked now - most “keyword” terms will link to a past article on the same topic - but the links rarely leave the Times’ site. The only exception is when they need to refer back to a prior story that they didn’t cover, but that another publication did. Sources are almost never linked; when they are, it’s to a PDF embed on the Times’ own site.

I assume they and all the other big publications have SEO editors who’ve decided that they need to do it for the sake of their metrics. They understand that if they link to the PDF, everyone will just click the link and leave their site. They’re right about that. But it is annoying.

[skrtskrt]

It's also a political tool.

About a year ago when the NYTimes wrote an article called liked "Who really gets to declare if there is famine in Gaza?", the conclusions of the article were that "well boy it sure is complicated but Gaza is not officially in famine". I found the conclusion and wording suspect.

I went looking to see if they would like to the actual UN and World Food Program reports. The official conclusions were that significant portions of Gaza were already officially in famine, but that not all of Gaza was. The rest of Gaza was just one or two levels below famine, but those levels are called like "Food Emergency" or whatever.

Essentially those lower levels were what any lay person would probably call a famine, but the Times did not mention the other levels or that parts were in the famine level - just that "Gaza is not in famine".

To get to the actual report took 5 or 6 hard-to-find backlinks through other NYTimes articles. Each article loaded with further NYTimes links making it unlikely you'd ever find the real one.

[Barbing]

Shoutout Ars Technica, where they never seem to sweat the… lost ad revenue? diminished time on page?… and give the PDF link.

[ninkendo]

Sure, after you dismiss the pop-up telling you to become an ars subscriber.

I’m only angry about this because I’ve been on ars since 2002, as a paid subscriber for most of that time, but I cancelled last year due to how much enshittification has begun to creep in. These popups remove any doubt about the decision at least.

(I cancelled because I bought a product they gave a positive review for, only to find out they had flat-out lied about its features, and it was painfully obvious in retrospect that the company paid Ars for a positive review. Or they’re so bad at their jobs they let clearly wrong information into their review… I’m not sure which is worse.)

[whycome]

Not just court cases. But so many situations where the primary sources are relevant. Most recently, I’ve seen journalists refer to questionable social media posts that they frame in a certain way but the actual posts don’t align with that frame

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"Why is it up to the judge versus the FTC or whoever to propose?"

The data sharing remedy and other remedies were not the judge's proposals. They were proposed by the parties.

[supernova87a]

yup, I just saw that in reading the ruling in more detail.

[ElijahLynn]

So true, I think it should be mandatory to put "sources:" as a consistently placed section in all "news" articles.

[warkdarrior]

Google's AI summary includes links to sources: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+latest+court+rul...

[electronicbob]

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story.

Usually I would agree with you, however, the link is in the article hyperlinked under "Amit Mehta" in the 3rd paragraph. Now could the reporter have made that clearer...yes, but it's still there.

[camillomiller]

As a reporter, I can tell you that your comment stems from a common fallacy: y’all think you know better than reporters what our jobs are and what the dynamics of our publishing platform entail. For some reason, everyone feels like they would know how to be a journalist better than the actual professionals.

That said, reporters have most probably nothing to do with what you’re decrying. Linking policies are not the reporter’s business. There are probably multiple layers of SEO “experts” and upper management deciding what goes on page and what not. Funnily enough, they might be super anal about what the story links, and then let Taboola link the worst shit on the Internet under each piece… So please, when you start your sentence with “reporters” please know that you’re criticizing something they have no power to change.

[inigoalonso]

How is providing factual information (e.g., "The full court ruling is available at https://court.rulings/case_123456.pdf", or at least "The case is number 123456.") not part of the reporter's job? No need to link to it, just provide the fact.

[mquander]

I sympathize with how annoying it must be to have other people messing up your work, but also, if your name is at the top of the page, and there's not really any other way for readers to know anyone in particular that is taking responsibility for any specific detail on that page, it's obviously going to be your reputation on the line to some extent.

[frontfor]

It doesn’t matter. From the general population point of view, whoever writes the article is the “reporter”, and “they” don’t provide the links. You can argue otherwise and it won’t change the optics.

[widhhddok]

This comment deflects from the very real original comment's gripe with not linking to the original source.

[supernova87a]

I don't really care if you think people don't understand details of the job you do, or the system in which you operate. Your name is on the article and it's my expectation at this point that someone telling a story give me the original source when it's easily available. I don't need to know the complications or reasons why it isn't done, I want the right outcome.

If anything, you should be helping to cut through the BS layers and insisting that the original source link (or, even just the full name of the court case) be included with your reporting.

[Aurornis]

> I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.

Bafflingly, I’ve found this practice to continue even in places like University PR articles describing new papers. Linking to the paper itself is an obvious thing to do, yet many of them won’t even do that.

In addition to playing games to avoid outbound links, I think this practice comes from old journalistic ideals that the journalist is the communicator of the information and therefore including the source directly is not necessary. They want to be the center of the communication and want you to get the information through them.

[nolist_policy]

They can't meaningfully link to the paper, because they relinquish all their copyright on the paper to the journal.

[Natsu]

I would go so far as to inherently mistrust any legal reporting that does not link to the ruling or trial footage at this point. I've watched multiple public trials and seen reporting that simply did not reflect what actually went on.

[mort96]

> I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point

And the reporter would rather you hear it second hand from them :)

I agree, online "journalists" are absolutely terrible at linking to sources. You'll have articles which literally just cover a video (a filmed press conference, a YouTube video, whatever) that's freely available online and then fail to link to said video.

I don't know what they're teaching at journalistic ethics courses these days. "Provide sources where possible" sounds like it should be like rule 1, yet it never happens.

[jt2190]

> … reporters covering court cases… never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story

This is an editorial decision and not something individual reporters get to decide. Headlines are the same.

[anticensor]

It is also meant to lessen the legal burden: when they don't link to primary source, nobody can claim the is inaccurate, missing essential facts or made up.

[eviks]

> never seem to simply paste the link

There is a link right there in 3rd paragraph: "U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta", though strangely under the name...

> I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point.

There is no way you'd have time for that (and more importantly, your average reader), but if you do, the extra time it'd take you to find the link is ~0.0% of the total extra time needed to read the decision directly, so that's fine?

> with the full details

You don't have them in those dozens of pages, for example, the very basics of judge's ideological biases are not included.

[renewiltord]

Actual answer is that majority journalists are summarizing other journalists who are summarizing someone they asked about the original content. They have never seen it themselves so can't link it.

[dragonwriter]

> I am not too familiar with antitrust precedent, but to what extent does the judge rule on how specific the data sharing need to be (what types of data, for what time span, how anonymized, etc. etc.) or appoint a special master? Why is that up to the judge versus the FTC or whoever to propose?

The judge doesn't propose, he rules on what the parties propose, and that can be an iterative process in complex cases. E.g.. in this case, he has set some parameters in this ruling, and set a date by which the parties need to meet on the details within those parameters.

[Self-Perfection]

What if we made crowdsourced database of external links to sources? Like SponsorBlock for skipping sponsored sections in YouTube videos.

[ChaoPrayaWave]

Maybe the media is just worried that if they include the original link, readers won’t bother with their few hundred words of ‘interpretation’ anymore.

[pentakkusu]

Not trying to be snarky but it is quite obvious that giving you the ability to make your own conclusions is never the goal of regular news sites.

[matt3D]

They don't necessarily want to be the gatekeepers of information, they just want your next click to be another news story on their website.

External links are bad for user retention/addiction.

This also has a side effect of back linking no longer being a measure of a 'good' website, so good quality content from inconsistently trafficked sites gets buried on search results.

[idiotsecant]

It's simple - the reason there's no PDF is that most people don't want one. If they did, the reporter would be incentivized to include it. You're complaining about them not serving a tiny, tiny minority of readers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF

Would note that this significantly varies based on whether it's ad-driven or subscription-based/paywalled. The former has no incentive to let you leave. The latter is trying to retain your business.

[lxgr]

I feel like way too many journalists or editors still see hyperlinks as a way of "sending traffic to competitors", and as such to be avoided at all cost.

[TallonRain]

I've noticed this too and I agree it's unacceptable practice. Journalism in general has become wildly resistant to properly citing their sources (or they simply make their citation as difficult to find as possible through various obfuscation techniques) and this is making independent validation of any information online that much more difficult while further entrenching a culture of "just trust me, bro" on the internet in general. It's a deeply infuriating and destructive practice that needs to die out. At least when I was in school & university, properly citing your sources was everything when it came to writing any sort of report or essay. How the adtech industry managed to quietly undo that standard expectation so thoroughly for the sake of engagement metrics is rather nuts to me.

[random3]

I was pleasantly noticing earlier how Quanta Magazine does a great job of linking to papers directly in the article.

[joshu]

for what it’s worth, reporters don’t get to include links in their articles. Usually the web producer does it.

[yxhuvud]

Not all courts post their judgements online with full access for everyone.

[giancarlostoro]

This is my pet peeve about most news articles. Give. me. raw. sources. Not edited clips, RAW CLIPS AND LINKS. I'm so tired of sensationalized news, I always look for raw sources or I assume there's a spin on the story. If someone made a news site that actually gave you raw sources, I would subscribe to them for life.

[supernova87a]

By the way, the worst laughable offenders of this idea are local TV news stations. As if to get the real insight on some world issue, I'm going to "stay up to date by going to KTVU.com for the latest on this breaking story!".

[ultrarunner]

Eventually, I think people will come to understand that local stations are entertainment outlooks, not informational outlets.

[throwaway48476]

Journalists actively hinder readers from finding the primary source because their coverage outranks it. If readers regularly saw the primary source they would realize how dishonest the Journalists are.

[AdamN]

> they must have been using the ruling PDF to write the story

Oh you sweet Summer child :-)

The worst is with criminal cases where they can't even be burdened to write what the actual charges are. It's just some vague 'crime' and the charges aren't even summarized - they're just ignored.

[varenc]

It's intentional. They don't want you engaging with content off their site. I hate it.

[supernova87a]

Is it not sad/telling that the reporter of the story couldn't summarize this in the story, but the bot here can? If there were an indicator of the future to come...