What are some best practices when choosing news websites to link to when I want the links to work years from now?

Many external links to Wikipedia are now dead links. I know not to trust Yahoo News, for example, since its links become dead links quite rapidly.

InquilineKea

links

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Donald.McLean: Just to make it clear, the reason why this question is off topic is that it is what they call an "open ended list question". In general, it should be possible for the question to be completely and comprehensively answered in one single answer.
Tim Post: Your question is definitely on the open-ended scale of things, but perhaps not entirely off topic. If your question were more about a concrete way to judge the worthiness of a source, in the context of trying to ensure that links that you create now will still work just as well years from now, it would be much more focused and objectively answerable. The answers that you received were more along these lines.

Answer by lechlukasz

You should generally avoid commercial sites. They have a tendency to close their articles for subscribers only, so is with the New York Times. Even if some portal have free archive now, he can change that policy in future. There's nothing more annoying than clicking in the link and having the screen requiring to pay. This can even make your visitors think your website is commercial and leave it for all.

The best way to refer to newspaper articles is to cite everything crucial, and provide the source as bookmark, with optional link (but the number of physical newspaper being more important, it is more likely to survive than link).

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Answer by Christian Pietsch

Not sure if this is an option in your context, but the only way to make sure URLs will not break and will still deliver the same contents in the years to come is to archive them. There is a non-commercial, free service that does just that: WebCite. You could then provide two links: one to the original source, and one to the archive copy at WebCite.

If providing two links or just archive links is not an option, I would second @lechlukasz in suggesting that non-commercial news websites are more likely not to move contents behind a paywall. Perhaps WikiNews is a safe bet for stable news links, being an official WikiMedia project just like Wikipedia.