Helping out your rivals?

• News Stations are dropping the sense of competition with their rivals.
• Link Journalism stands for reporting that has links embedded in it, so that the article itself is open ended and not a dead end.
  
• Drudge report made link journalism famous
• News institutions like NBC and New York Times are caving in and starting "link journalism?
  

The Code of News

Ever since the creation of the main broadcast news stations, there has been an underlying code amongst everyone involved: the sense of competition. In a world that is run by ratings, money, and being the first to break and run the best possible story, it is every station for themselves. The same applies to newspapers since their conception. However the online world has changed this. In online journalism, it has now become the trend to do "link journalism" where in fact you are citing, using, and acutally promoting your enemies. In a sense, the standard now is to help out your "bitter" rivals.

What is Link Journalism?

"Link journalism is linking to reporting or sources on the web to enhance, complement, or add more context to original reporting. Link journalism can also be a topical news aggregation, with links to interesting and important stories from any source on the web." publish 2.0

This act has been around for years and has now spilled over into the news stations who were reluctant at first to adhere to this standard because of the code embedded in them since their inceptions.

How did this trend start?

"The answer is that Drudge, along with Google, figured out that in the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news."- Scott Karp

This quote comes from an article on Publish 2.0. Here Karp gives credit to the highly popular news website Drudge Report as the starter of the link journalism online news craze. Drudge Report first became famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, and has been one of the most popular sites in the world since then. This along with the increasing popualarity of blogs has forced news stations, and more importantly the websites of the dying newspapers to rethink their news telling strategies.


Who is Caving in?

According to Brian Setler of the New York Times, NBC will begin to introduce local TV station web sites with links to their local newspapers, videos, and other sources. In addition, the NY Times, plans to add an additional page that will be chalked full of links. This can especially be seen in the political coverage of the NY Times. In today's article about economic plans, NY times promotes a blog called The Caucus.


What does this mean?

With the death of the newspaper now being a matter of when not if, it is imperative that newspapers learn to adapt to the standards of online journalism. If these papers do not being to cater towards the notion of link journalism, they are doomed to extinction, not just in the print world, but in the online as well. Newspapers have gotten themselves into trouble in the past by refusing to adapt to the oncoming trends. They cant' afford to do it again here.