Once an emblem of daring leadership and innovation, nando.net is a placeholder site.

A walled garden strategy prevails at the N&O, which in its new-media heyday was nando.net and arguably the first daily newspaper to publish on the Web.

Today's downtown art story illustrates some of the problems with their walled garden.

That story simply ignores the abundance of relevant and enlightening Web resources outside the N&O advertiser list and story archives, as though site visitors wouldn't realize they were being abused.

You would think from merely reading the story that the North Carolina Museum of Art has no Web site, and that artist Jaume Plensa is adequately defined by a passing reference to his name and to other N&O stories.

In fact, the story at issue here implies a special abundance of well-justified, outbound links, and concerns an issue which has been greeted by considerable blogger comment. It is awash in opportunities for a mainstream newspaper to productively involve its readers and fully serve the public education function that mainstream newspapers claim, with increasing emptiness, as their special purview.

All of the key recommendations from careful online newspaper analysts could have been implemented here, with thundering impact.

This story involves an internationally known artist, a number of public and private institutions, failures of public leadership and the exhaustion of a would-be benefactor. Specifically, it details the withdrawal by Capitol Broadcasting's Jim Goodmon of a $2.5 million gift. According to the N&O:

"I'm done with the patron business," Goodmon said Tuesday. "The council lost its vision. I expected the mayor to at least fight about it. He ran with the herd."

Such a well-chosen quote, yet nowhere in or around the story is there any indication that Capitol Broadcasting has a Web site where one may find Goodman's brief corporate biography and learn something about the enterprises which permitted him to offer such a gift in the first place. The fact that Capitol Broadcasting and the N&O are in some sense competitors makes linking to those resources more of an imperative, not less of one, for failure to do so undermines the N&O's credibility.

Having arrived at the N&O site by way of a Guardian Unlimited story about Apple's new iTunes video download service, I held onto hope until I had read the entire story, thinking I might find relevant links at the end, Guardian-style.

What the N&O styles "local search," proved to be nothing of the sort, at least for my purposes, so I was driven away, unhappy. Using a variety of non-N&O tools, I ferreted out the links used in this blog post.

That is essentially what happens when Web-savvy users visit a walled garden newspaper site. They are displeased, even angry not to find a fully interactive service, of which outbound links were the first and are the most fundamental component.

They leave, and their displeasure is what they carry away with them. Mostly the comparatively young whom newspapers had planned to reach via the Web, the Web-savvy tend to leave quickly, often never to return.

They look for and find Web-adapted ways to meet their information needs.