Linking helps newspapers profit from others

Satisfying a hunger

Hungry newsreaders appreciate anything that expands the amount of news they get the opportunity to digest. Readers want information. Even if those news sites link to other places, the readers appreciate that site’s dedication to provide all the information they can about a topic.

Large news organizations like the New York Times are linking to other sites. The photo below is an image of NYTimes.com’s Reading the Web - Ideas Blog.


The page leads the reader away to articles from other news sites such as Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and even small, specialized publications.

“The web, after all, isn’t really about content. It’s about connections between content, people, and ideas,” says Scott Karp, the man who coined the term link journalism.

Factors in link journalism’s popularity:

· It changes the news world from a local market to a place where readers can search across different segments.
· It then helps readers sort out the infinite amount of news they could encounter on the web.

Local news has lost importance in link journalism. Because the web allows everything to be local in a sense, then including as much information about as many places as possible has become the most popular practice. Yahoo! Buzz has even shorter descriptions of links than the New York Times Ideas Blog, and focuses on just getting as many links on that page as possible.


Josh Korr explains in his article, Nervous About Link Journalism? Ignore Web’s "Cesspool" And Tap Its "Natural Spring", that the web could use some more ethics, trust, and transparency.

Reasons why news organizations have been wary of linking:

1. They ignored the existence of other news organizations and would never send readers away from their own site.
2. Because news organizations had always kept to themselves, it was difficult to find good stories from the many places to get news.
3. Journalists worry that the web allows links to inaccurate information and unreliable sources.

When one technological idea succeeds in this digital age, everyone starts to use it. If all the major news organizations start linking to other sources, then the reader will still have the same choice to make...

Who does it best?

An editor no longer filters and compiles articles that are written for one specific paper. The editor of an aggregated news site now filters all articles that are available from any organization.

Some people (like Scott Karp in How Newspapers Abdicated the Front Page’s Influence) criticize the Drudge Report for not having any original content and not being real journalism. This site has completely eliminated the short article briefs seen in NYTimes.com's Ideas Blog or Yahoo! Buzz. It focuses solely on links with some pictures thrown in.


The Drudge Report is all about links, and is very successful. Karp describes how some people even go so far as to say that cable networks base their coverage of stories on what Drudge determines is important. So that is an example of how much link journalism influences the media today.