Anyone Can Write. Editing Is Another Matter

Louis-Nino Kansoun is right that anyone can now produce something shaped like an article. He is describing half the problem. The other half is that in Cameroon, the people editing those articles are not leaving the reader any way to check them.

"That work begins after the document has been written," Louis-Nino Kansoun writes in Anyone Can Write an Article. Journalism Is Another Matter (opens in a new tab). "It means returning to the original source, checking what each figure actually measures, looking for evidence that contradicts the argument and asking who benefits, who loses and who pays."

I read that sentence twice, agreed with all of it, and then did the thing a reader does. I went looking for the original source. There was nothing to click. Fifteen paragraphs, not one link out of the page. The only external links on the whole article are the ones the template puts there — the sister publications in the top bar, the share buttons, the social icons. The byline sits at the bottom in bold italic, no author page behind it.

This is a column, not a reported story, and columns are not obliged to carry footnotes. I am not accusing anyone of hiding anything. But there is something worth sitting with in an article that names verification as the profession's last remaining advantage and then hands the reader no thread to pull. The standard he sets is correct. It just stops at the edge of the page.

Because the argument is only half finished. Yes, anyone can write. The scarce skill was never typing. But Kansoun locates the scarce skill in the checking, and the checking is now table stakes. In the internet era the editor's job has a second half he does not mention: after you have verified the thing, you have to leave the verification attached to the page so that the reader, and the machine, can retrace it. A link is not decoration. A link is the receipt.

Cameroonian online media has largely not made this turn.

Here is what I actually did, so you can do it yourself and disagree with me. I took three Cameroonian news sites that publish daily, pulled three recent article pages from each, and counted every external link on the page. On all three sites, the external links were byte-identical across all three articles. A sister site. An advertising partner. Google News. On one, a betting company. Different stories, different facts, different reporters — same links every time.

Links that never change from one article to the next are not citations. They are furniture. Which means that across those nine articles, the number of links pointing at a source, a report, a court filing, a ministry statement, a company's own figures, was zero. My method is rough — I counted links across the whole page rather than isolating the body — but that is the point. Even counting that generously, nothing editorial turned up.

Ask what that costs and most editors will tell you about readers. Don't send them away. We worked for that traffic. It is the oldest instinct in the business and it is exactly backwards, and Google has said so in language a developer can read. "Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl," the search documentation on crawlable links (opens in a new tab) states, adding that "generally, Google can only crawl your link if it's an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute." Links are how the web knows anything exists. Refusing to link is not hoarding your readers. It is telling the rest of the internet that your page is a dead end, and being believed.

The internal case is worse. A Cameroonian outlet has covered the same fuel subsidy fight, the same Camtel tender, the same missing budget line for a decade. That archive is the real asset. It is the thing a foreign correspondent cannot reproduce and an AI cannot invent. And nearly every one of those articles sits alone, linking to nothing, linked from nothing, unfindable except by the person who already knows it is there. An editor who does not link back into their own archive is throwing away the only inventory they own. The reader who lands on today's piece and wants the backstory finds no door, so they leave. The crawler finds no door either, so it concludes there is no backstory.

Then there is the part Kansoun's argument runs directly into. When a machine answers a question about Cameroon, it works from what it can find, attribute, and point at. If your reporting exists only as unlinked text on a site nobody links to, your work does not vanish — it gets absorbed. The facts survive. The credit does not. You become the uncredited source for a summary that names somebody else, usually somebody in Paris or Lagos who linked properly. Journalism's ability to hold power to account, which is where Kansoun ends, depends on the audience being able to tell who did the work. Sourcing is how you tell them.

Google's own guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab) asks whether it "present[s] information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page." That is not an SEO trick. Read it again — it is a description of editing. Clear sourcing. Named author. Traceable claims. The search engine is asking for exactly what a good desk always asked for. It just wants it in HTML.

So what does the job look like now. Verify, the way Kansoun says, and then attach what you verified: link the specific document, not the ministry's homepage. Link the claim, not the topic. When you write "according to a report," the words "a report" are the link, and if you cannot produce the URL, ask yourself whether you actually read it. Link your own archive on every reference to a running story, and give it real anchor text — "the tender that failed in March," not "here." Give every byline a page with a name, a face, and a history, because an author nobody can look up is a claim nobody can weigh. Keep URLs alive; a redesign that breaks ten years of links destroys more institutional memory than any fire. And when a source is offline — a printed gazette, a document handed to you in a corridor — say so in the text, with the date and the reference number. Unlinkable is fine. Unsourced is not.

Most publications don't do this. That is the whole finding. It is also the cheapest fix on the list — no money, no new CMS, no consultant, about ninety seconds per article.

Someone will object that half the sites we would link to will be gone in three years, and they are right — Cameroonian institutional web hosting is a graveyard. Archive the page before you link it and link the archive too. Someone else will say links cost bandwidth on a 3G connection. An anchor tag is a few dozen bytes. The autoplay video header is the problem, not the citation.

Kansoun writes that journalists are needed "because their work demands a discipline that people promoting a policy, company, individual or cause have little reason to apply to themselves." True. But discipline that leaves no evidence is indistinguishable from its absence, and the reader is not obliged to take it on faith. The work begins after the document has been written. On the internet it ends only when the reader can walk back down the same path you did and see what you saw.

Anyone can write an article. Anyone can also claim to have checked one. The link is the difference.