Print is in trouble these days; everyone’s saying it, most recently Michael Kinsley in Time, so there must be something to it. Kinsley’s piece is a discourse on how some news organizations will survive and prosper in the transition from print to online and others won’t.

Given this context there’s an amusing gaffe in the piece as it’s presented on the Time Web site. At one point in his argument, Kinsley writes, “There is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms.” I assumed “Myleftarmpit.com” was just some phrase Kinsley invented as a generic put-down for a personal Web site, but there it was on Time.com, highlighted as a link. Gee, maybe it’s real! Some obscure site Kinsley wants us to see?

I clicked on it. Oops — file not found. There is no myleftarmpit.com. But some dumb process in Time’s content-management software recognized the domain name and automatically turned it into a link.

Additional, inadvertent lesson from Kinsley’s piece: When news organizations transition from print to online, they need to pay attention to the links they post. Links aren’t technical window-dressing; they are as or more important than the words around them. They need to be edited, too.

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