Wednesday, August 4, 2010

When reporting about a website, name the website!

I was getting my hair cut when I picked up the Placentia News-Times, published by the folks that bring you the Orange County Register. Page 3 of the July 29 paper included a story about Placentia-Linda Hospital that began as follows:

A new feature on Placentia-Linda Hospital's website now shows the emergency room's wait time.

The story went on to describe the feature, the steps taken by the parent company (Tenet) to implement the feature, and future plans for the feature.

They just left one thing out of the article.

The article failed to mention the URL for the Placentia-Linda Hospital website.

I figured that this was just an issue with the print edition, so after my hair was cut (I'm looking pretty good now, by the way) I went to a computer and found the online version of the article.

The online version didn't give Placentia-Linda Hospital's website URL either.

That URL, by the way, is http://www.placentialinda.com/. And here's what the new website feature looks like.



However, I will confess that the Placentia News-Times article does have a nice file photo of the entrance to the hospital - something that this blog post has failed to provide.

I guess that's why they're professional journalists and I'm just a mere blogger.

P.S. Ironically, another story by the same writer did include a URL. So I'm not sure why no URL was provided in the Placentia-Linda Hospital article. Perhaps there's ill will between Tenet and the Register after this article. It's interesting that you can get to this article via this Google search:



Ouch.
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