Last week, a new photos screensaver was released for Windows that continuously flips pictures of missing and exploited children on your computer screen. This missing kids screensaver fetches live data of children that went missing near your physical location to display them on your idle computer screen as a photo slideshow. [much like photocasting]
The story was prominently covered on CNN but for some unknown reason, CNN.com did not link to the screensaver website though they did mention the full URL in the text of the story.
Therefore, despite getting featured on CNN, the Missing Kids website have registered only 3,500 downloads of the screensaver so far. And they get no link authority from CNN since Googlebots cannot read non-active text hyperlinks.
And it's not just with the Missing kids website, most of the stories on CNN have non-clickable external links. Why? Do they fear that visitors will immediately quit when they see a blue link in the story? Visitors will leave the page in any case but they'll love you more if you direct them to useful exit paths.
BBC and The New York Times are probably the most generous news sites when it comes to linking to external content. Both these sites properly list down the website URLs referenced in the story - that approach is liked by most readers since they don't have to copy-paste URL - a click takes them to the next website.
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