They still don’t get it. American Metal Market has a story today called “Building of new economy discussed by steel, union leaders”. I was mildly interested in the story for its own sake, but it’s much more important as an example of the contortions a steel industry publisher will go through to avoid being even remotely helpful to readers who want to follow up on a story or dig deeper.
The story refers to a conference in Washington DC. There are no links to the conference website, no links or further information about the people and organizations represented there. You can’t take any of the information and drop it in a browser because you can’t copy and paste anything. And, most perverse of all, there is no link (not even a URL reference) to content which AMM found on the web at a blog written by the conference presenters. In other words, AMM will scour the web on behalf of its readers to bring us dead text.
So for all of those people frustrated by this continued Luddite behavior, here are some of the links that AMM chose not to share.
The article in AMM (needs a subscription): http://www.amm.com/2009-10-29__17-19-29.html
The Conference Website: Building the New Economy
The Conference location: If you want to know where it was
The Blog: Conference Presenter Comments
The Conference Report (in PDF format): Building the New Economy
The Union website: USW
US Steel’s website: US Steel
Who Leo Gerard is: Leo Gerard
Who John Surma is: John Surma
The WTO: World Trade Organization
The EPI: The Economic Policy Institute
Well you get the idea. Now why won’t AMM (or any other industry publisher for that matter) do that?