Andy Rankin

For a while now CNN.com has been linking to articles on local TV station web sites (presumably CNN affiliates). You can tell that they’re external links because they label them with the call letters of the station (in this example, WPBF and WKMG). Considering the traffic that CNN.com gets this has to be a huge boost to these local stations. If they have any kind of analytics on their sites they must notice when one of their articles gets picked up by CNN.com.

I’ve noticed a few times that when you click over to one of these stories it can be a challenge figuring out where the story is taking place. Some of the local stations are running their articles in a traditional format with a “dateline” that tells you where they are. Others, like this example, don’t have a traditional dateline. I’m sure that when they developed the site they figured that their audience was local (the domain name is local6.com) so it wasn’t important to list the location. When people start linking in from CNN.com the local audience probably ends up in the minority.

Fortunately for me, when I was reading this rather dreadful article about jumping fish I knew where the Suwannee River was so I figured out the location without having to notice the small mention of Orlando in the title bar of the browser.