NYPA 2010 - Link Journalism

All the News That’s Fit to Link: The Value and Practice of Link Journalism Greg Linch / News Innovation Manager / Publish2

Where Do People Find News on the Web? Newspaper Web site homepage Google Huffington Post Drudge Report Blogs Facebook Twitter Yahoo Email LINKS

Links = Votes for Content

Definitions
Linking – puts the “web” in World Wide Web
Aggregation – compiling links as way of filtering the Web
Curation – human-powered aggregation
In the context of journalism…

How can linking be journalism? Link journalism is linking to reporting or sources on the Web to enhance, complement or add more context to original reportin g. Link journalism can also be a topical news curation that helps people find the most interesting, important and credible content from any source on the Web.

The Ethic of the Link

Plagiarism? Don’t blame the technology “ In response on Wednesday, Posner said he blamed the ‘warp speed of the net’ and his ‘master electronic files’ system. Concluded Posner: ‘In the compressed deadlines of the Beast, it now seems certain that those master files were a recipe for disaster for me. It allowed already published sources to get through to a number of my final [works] and in the quick turnaround I then obviously lost sight of the fact that it belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote.’ ” – The Miami Herald , Feb. 11, 2010

Zachery Kouwe “ If there's a minor news story on a trustworthy wire service, and you think you need it on the blog, then link to it . You add no value by rushing – with ‘essence of speed,’ no less – to get the exact same story yourself. You're a well-paid full-time journalist at the New York Times; there are surely higher and better uses of your valuable time than going back to rewrite a story which already exists elsewhere. The sin that resulted in Kouwe’s departure from the NYT was that he rewrote badly, and left large chunks of other people’s work unchanged in his own copy. But the true underlying sin was that he spent so much time rewriting in the first place: the beauty of blogs, which exist to link elsewhere, is that he should never have needed to do that at all.” Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ – Felix Salmon, Reuters

Link Blogger and Long-Form Journalist

The Power of the Link But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink. An old-school columnist can write 800 brilliant words analyzing or commenting on, say, a new think-tank report or scientific survey. But in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context) . Online, a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience . Yes, a few sentences of bloggy spin may not be as satisfying as a full column, but the ability to read the primary material instantly—in as careful or shallow a fashion as you choose—can add much greater context than anything on paper. Even a blogger’s chosen pull quote, unlike a columnist’s, can be effortlessly checked against the original. – Andrew Sullivan, “Why I Blog,” The Atlantic, October 2008

Andrew Sullivan and Iran “ He is gradually weaving together a complex narrative of the events taking place half a world away by piecing together a collection of eye-witness accounts, Iranian tweets, cell-phone videos uploaded on YouTube, reader emails from the US and from far away, riveting photos, and links to a multitude of blogs both big and small.” The New, New Journalism: Andrew Sullivan on Iran – Nisha Chittal, Politicoholic

Sharing What You’re Reading

Sharing Links on Twitter

Collaborative Linking Across Newsrooms

The Need for “Social Journalism” “ It's a classic case of too much noise and too little filter.”

Social Journalism on Spokesman Review

Dynamic Storytelling

The Power of Sending People Away Top News Sites in U.S., May 2008 Sessions per Users Top News Sites in U.S., June 2008 Time per Person

Solving Filter Failure
Here's what the Internet did: it introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there's no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish...The filter for quality is now way downstream of the site of production.
What we're dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we're always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload... Thinking about information overload isn't accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.
- Clay Shirky, Web 2.0 Expo 2009

Worrying About a “World of Disinformation” on the Web The web is becoming a cesspool. - Google CEO Eric Schmidt Question: You've been quoted as saying a number of times that there should be a "flight to quality," that there's an awful lot of garbage out on the Internet -- Schmidt: Let me just say precisely: It's a sewer out there.

Thinking While Linking “ Link journalism makes context easy in stories online. But the link in itself is not necessarily journalism — it’s what you do to verify its source and accuracy that makes it journalism and, thus, more valuable.”

Journalism is Curation

More Examples

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Copenhagen Climate Summit

Mother Jones
The Nation
Grist
The UpTake
TreeHugger
Yahoo News
The Huffington Post
Pulitizer Center
on Crisis Reporting
OnEarth
Discover
In These Times
ProPublica

If Journalists and News Organizations Don’t Filter the Web, Who Will?

Practical Tips – Step 1

Contact Info
Greg Linch
@greglinch
[email_address]
www.greglinch.com

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NYPA 2010 - Link Journalism

by Greg Linch on Mar 27, 2010

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NYPA 2010 - Link Journalism — Presentation Transcript