Hooked On... New Jersey?

On Thursday, Suzanne Levinson said that most people arrive at the Miami Herald's website through a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Because of this, online journalists put related links directly on the page with the news story in order to keep web browsers on their site. So I decided to do a Google News search for the New York Giants and take a look at the first page that came up. The article I found was from Newsday (based in Long Island, New York), entitled "Giants return to heroes' welcome in NY, NJ" (http://www.newsday.com).

The article covered the Giants' return home after their Super Bowl victory on Sunday night in Arizona. Writer David Porter included quotes from several players to show emotion and mentioed that two million people were estimated to watch the ticker tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan this morning. The parade was the first half of the two-state celebration today, with a rally following across the river at Giants Stadium in the afternoon.

The article was published online at 11:27 this morning, suggesting that it did not appear in today's newspaper and because it does not cover the events, only previews them, it will most likely not be featured in tomorrow's news. Therefore the article was written for the web. But unlike the observation of Ms. Levinson, there is not a lot of additional information regarding the Giants on the page with the article. On the right hand side, there is a list of other news from the day and below that, there is a video of people riding the Long Island Railroad into New York City for the parade. Other than that, there is merely a link to other articles, which does not bring you to more articles on the Giants, or even in sports, but rather more articles about New Jersey. It is unlikely that a person searching for "New Jersey" would find that article, so why does the article lead the reader to other stories about the Garden State? The subject of the article is not New Jersey, but the New York Giants. It is much more likely that someone searching for the Giants, as I was, would find the article. So unlike Levinson's suggestions, Newsday does not do much to keep Giants fans hooked on their website.