If you see a blog post titled “10 Iconic Journalists Every J-Student Should Study” and want to share it with your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or old-fashioned e-mail contacts, please consider what you’re endorsing when you link to it.
That’s fine. Some, most or maybe all of them think it’s worth sharing. No problem there.
But I’ve wondered since last night, when I first saw the link, if people realized what it was: linkbaiting as SEO, with the hopes of increasing traffic to an irrelevant site, boosting its rank in search results for the keywords in its URL.
Of course we all want links to our sites. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the folks who tweet and retweet the link become a party to this practice of gaming the Web and devaluing higher-quality content that generates traffic organically.
Context
I received an email notification that I had a new message sent through my personal blog’s contact form at 12:37 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2010. Here are the details:
NAME
Amber Johnson
E-MAIL
amber.johnson1983@gmail.com
MESSAGE
Hi, We posted an article, " 10 Iconic Journalists Every JStudent Should Study” (http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2010/01/04/10-iconic-journalists-every-jstudent-should-study/), and I thought that you or your readers might find it appealing.
Wishing you Happy & Prosperous New Year
Amber Johnson
I’ve received a few messages like this in the past and planned to disregard this one too. Judging by the approach and complete lack of personalization (that’s right, don’t even use my name in the note, which is probably submitted by some kind of script), I guessed that other journalism bloggers had received also it.
Sure enough, I saw a few links to it on Twitter within minutes. Did they think it was linkbait?
Here’s how a journalist should verify content before linking to it
1. What is the URL?
The domain is the first possible indicator. For the “10 Iconic Journalists” post, this should set off the first set of warning bells:
Come on, it looks fishy from onset. You probably wouldn’t open an email from Online Colleges, nor would you likely click such a textlink ad in your email program, so why would you want be a relay point for that promotion?
2. What’s on the site?
College-related content and search.
3. Does this content on this site seem out of place?
Does a site called OnlineColleges really care what journalism students study? No, they want you to use their service. Look at the other recent blog content. And the email sender was “savvy with their target group — journalists on Twitter — who will tweet and RT the hell out of the link,” as Daniel Petty said in a reply. It’s very smart of them to have authorititave people with strong reputations to generate buzz.
4. Who owns the site?
Whenever this isn’t immediately clear on the about page or in the footer, you should be suspicious. Why don’t they list it?
5. Who owns the URL?
OnlineColleges.net is registered to Stephanie Marchetti of Glen Ellyn, IL. Based on a search of her name and search of her email address, it looks as though she’s registered other similarly named domains, such as graduatedegree[dot]org, mbainfo[dot]com and eduers[dot]com. She owns a total of 51 domains, according to DomainTools.com.
Note: I couldn’t find anything connecting her to the email address that sent the message to my blog.
6. Who has previously linked to the site?
Search link:URL on Google (substitute the address for URL and make sure there’s no space between it and the link: search operator).
7. Who sent the link?
“Amber Johnson”
8. Is it a real person?
The name sounded like a fake when I first saw the message, so I searched Amber Johnson, Amber Johnson + advertising, Amber Johnson + pr, Amber Johnson + Online Colleges, etc, etc. with no luck.
I also searched that name with the registrants name — without success.
9. If it’s not a real person, who is it?
I searched the email address from my contact form and didn’t find anything helpful until I put quotes around it. After the search, sometime during the 1 a.m. hour, I got one result, which included this:
The IP address links to a page with more details, which indicates the email bounced off a telecom company server in India. Not very helpful, but an important step in this investigation.
As I did all this, I was chatting with Daniel Bachhuber on IM (Daniel aptly noted that someone might just be using that particular server to send the message; it might not be the actual computer from where it was sent) and posting a few key details to Twitter (read some of the discussion).
I also searched “amber.johnson1983,” which gave me four results last night, including the one from the above search. Two results showed the same message I received and the other showed a similarly spammy request.
It’s also good to read, watch, listen to or in some other way consume the content on that page before you share (I’ll admit that I too could do a better job of fully consuming the content).
You could also follow steps similar what I did with the “10 Iconic Journalists” post.
Take away the source and context and the big question is, “Does this provide value?” Or, “Does this meaninfully add to the conversation?” Regardless of everything else, I knew from seeing the content that I found this post to have no real value. (OK, maybe just a tad in stirring comments of who should be on the list).
Conclusion
Don’t take the linkbait. Whether it’s an unknown site that looks spammy or a big site trying to keep their traffic up throughout the day by posting new content with little value, you don’t want to be known as someone who falls for this and, by making the bait-layer successful, strengthening the practice.
What’s the best etiquette? I think it’s ok to send someone a message such as, “Hey, I thought you’d be interested in this” or “I’d love your thoughts on this” and let the person do what they want. They’ll link it on their own if they like it. I’m more likely to not share a link if you ask just because I don’t want to open the door to more solicitations.
For the newsy crowd, journalists shouldn’t include a source or a source’s information in a story without verifying who they are and what they’re motivation is, so why not do the same on Twitter?
Sure, you don’t have to. But with all the noise and what I’ll call chaff-disguised-as-wheat online, why not — as a journalist — do your due diligence when sharing a link? And, sure, you may say a link or RT is not an endorsement, but it might still be perceived as such.
It’s not simply about denying linkbaiters their pageviews and buzz, it’s about your credibility and reputation as a trusted source of information.
Moreover, verifying information or links you pass along is something everyone, not just journalists should do, no matter the medium. And, if you can’t verify it, provide context. (More good reading on that topic here.)
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.
“Because it’s on the Web” is no excuse for not verifying. That just leads to low-quality content, of which there’s plenty online. Instead, you should strive for the best quality because there is so much garbage out there.
Far too often people tweet or retweet something as a knee-jerk reaction, whether they read it or not. It seems that some people have become accustomed to over-sharing links. They might be well intentioned, but I would just like those frequent linkers to think:
Is this really providing value?
Is this unique? Specifically, has it been tweeted a million and two times already?
True, we all have different audiences and even having many overlapping followers doesn’t mean you should leave out the others who might not have seen it. We all need to be more discerning about what we share — and we need to know where it comes from.
There’s plenty of linking, but I’d like to see more thinking along with it.
Epilogue
Because we’re talking about links to lists, I’ll also say that all these of specific skills journalists need to have are all well and good, but the fundamentals are more important. Specifically, thinking critically and being skeptical.
Publish2 empowers news organizations to band together in a Newsgroup to bring their readers the best of the Web through collaboration. A Publish2 Newsgroup enables any group of journalists to collect news and information on any given topic in one place, and then automatically publish the curated stream of links.
The Northwest Newsgroup was the first to prove that a large group of reporters, editors, and producers across a wide range of newsrooms — from a variety of media companies — could collaborate to curate regional breaking news. The Northwest Newsgroup became a collaborative newswire for the Web, one based on linking to the original reporting at the source.
This week, during the Copenhagen climate summit, a group of journalists from Mother Jones, The Nation, Grist, The UpTake, TreeHugger, and other news organizations have applied the collaborative newswire model to a major international news story, forming the Copenhagen News Collaborative to curate the best coverage from their own reporters, editors, and analysts covering the event.
Here’s the collaborative newswire published at Mother Jones:
Grist published links from their own an newsgroup alongside the collaborative Copenhagen Newswire (Indy Media @ Copenhagen), which became an integral part of their Copenhagen coverage:
Collaboration is key: A lone news organization couldn’t provide the range of news and analysis covered by the stories being submitted by these sources.
Think about how you can make this work at a local level. Are you already exchanging links, stories, and photos with other local news organizations? Or are you still trying to cover every angle of every story on your own? What about national and international news? Would you rather publish links chosen by an algorithm trying its best to match a keyword search, or a high quality newswire full of stories hand-picked by journalists who know their beats?
Ready to build your own collaborative newswire?
Choose a topic or region, start a Publish2 Newsgroup, invite your peers and colleagues from other news organizations to join, and use Publish2 widgets and feeds to automatically publish a stream of curated news across platforms, send links to Twitter, and bring your readers the best of the Web, from any source in the world.
Publish2’s mission and unique tools encourage the spirit of open information and effectively fosters collaboration between teams of journalists and readers. Its link publishing widgets and easy-to-use in-browser tools are designed to fit cohesively into time-pressed journalists’ work days.
Publish2 is a platform for collaborative journalism, and so it’s only fitting to recognize that this award belongs to the collaborators. First, our AMAZING team. If you know our team, you know just how amazing they are. Publish2 is in every way a product of teamwork and collaboration. Here are Ryan Sholin,Daniel Bachhuber, and me after receiving the award (Greg Linch was also there for the awards, but like a true journalist he kept his steady hand on the live stream of the ceremony that he was piloting):
Above all, this award belongs to the journalists and news orgs who have used the Publish2 platform to boldly expand the practice of journalism on the web.
It belongs to journalists like the Northwest News gang — Elaine Helm, Paul Balcerak, Seth Long, Angela Dice, Brianne Pruitt, and many others — who have used Publish2 to trail blaze new models of collaboration across newsrooms and across media companies. Or like the New York Times tech journalists, who understand that curating the web is most powerful when it is collaborative, social, and highlights the judgment of individual journalists who know their beats. Or like the journalists in all of the newsrooms who helped us map our features and design to their workflows, to make it easy to integrate curating the web into everyday newsroom operations.
These journalists are the real innovators. We at Publish2 salute you.
We also thank the Gannett Foundation for creating this award to highlight technical innovation, which is so essential for journalism to survive and thrive in the digital age.
We’re excited to announce new support for Publish2’s Social Journalism features. You can now embed saved videos in Publish2’s javascript widget and in WordPress posts, widgets, and pages using Daniel Bachhuber’s Publish2 WordPress plugin. You can also send embedded videos to WordPress and Movable Type posts using Publish2 blog connect feature.
To display saved videos in a Publish2 widget, on the Create Widget page, simply select Videos as an element to display. You can customize the width of the videos to fit the news site, sidebar, or story page where you embed your Publish2 widget.
The widget currently supports YouTube videos, but we’ll be adding more services soon.
Adding videos to a WordPress widget or page using the plugin works the same way — just select videos as an element to display and set the width for the emebed:
Wordpress Widget
Wordpress Page
You can see videos displayed using the WordPress plugin on this blog in the What We’re Reading sidebar and What We’re Reading page:
To send saved videos as embeds to a WordPress or Movable Type post, click Manage Links on your links page or a Newsgroup links page, select saved videos (along with tweets, links, and anything else you want to send), select videos as an element under “Publish to a blog,” and set the width:
Using Link Assist in the WordPress Plugin, you can embed saved videos simply by clicking the Embed video button:
I embedded the video below — along with the comment and other info saved to Publish2 — with one click using Link Assist:
rosstmiller on YouTube | August 13, 2009 Ryan Sholin says: In this video, FriendFeed (comically) reveals the secret little orderly process that keeps updates flowing through their network in real-time. A little industrial for my tastes, and proponents of the DRY principle in programming might throw up in their mouths a little bit. (Spotted via ReadWriteWeb.)
The WordPress plugin also supports Vimeo, with more services coming soon.
We’re proud to announce that Publish2 has acquired Wired Journalists.
In January 2008, Howard Owens, Zac Echola, and myself, Ryan Sholin, launched a social network with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.
Wired Journalists was born with the mission of connecting the knowledgeable, expert innovators in online news with journalists of all stripes hoping to learn something new about their evolving craft.
At Publish2, that mission of connecting journalists based on common goals and interests will continue and — we hope — grow exponentially as the Wired Journalists network becomes a space for collaboration on real-world reporting as well as conversations about craft.
When I joined Publish2 earlier this year, Scott Karp and I started sketching out what Wired Journalists might look like if it had the funding, attention, and staff that we’d always wanted.
Out of those conversations came a rock-solid proposal to give Wired Journalists a new home under the Publish2 banner, where I could personally devote time to it as a part of my role at Publish2.
What’s going to happen to WiredJournalists.com?
It’s going to live on, powered by Ning, with some noticeable changes. For starters, we’re going to immediately implement Publish2’s editorial standards for membership and moderate new registrations. From here on in, all new members at Wired Journalists will be journalists.
You’ll also notice some Publish2-powered streams of links start flowing through the homepage and other sections of Wired Journalists. The “Feedstream,” a raw aggregation of RSS feeds, has been replaced with a recommended reading list of links about Media & Journalism from Publish2. Over the next few weeks, we’ll invite some of the sharpest eyes in the media blogosphere to join a Publish2 Newsgroup to power the News page at Wired Journalists. Plus, you’ll find links to the best media jobs, tutorials, and tools for journalists getting their hands dirty with video, audio, data, code, and more.
Who’s going to manage the site?
Howard Owens and Zac Echola are staying on as Editors-At-Large, which means they’ll be part of the team flagging content to feature, moderating submissions, and recommending links, among other editorial tasks.
As a part of my role at Publish2, I’ll be doing plenty of day-to-day community management with a lot of help from colleagues like Publish2 Senior Editor Josh Korr, CEO Scott Karp, and soon, up-and-coming online journalist Greg Linch, who joins Publish2 in September.
But, as always, we’ll be asking for help from the 3,000-plus members of the Wired Journalists network, to submit interesting blog posts, news stories, photos, videos, examples of your own work, and stories of your own success.
A personal thank you…
…to those of you who have made Wired Journalists a community built on collaboration and communication among journalists of all skill levels, crafts, organizations, and ideas. You’ve made this network strong, and we’re looking forward to working with you to make it stronger.
What’s Social Journalism? It’s what you do when you gather information in social media channels and then report it to your readers. Watching a Twitter #hashtag for posts related to a critical local issue or big event, then publishing them in a roundup or sidebar on your news site? That’s Social Journalism. Scanning YouTube for the latest video from a protest, county fair, or city council meeting? That’s Social Journalism.
Why is Social Journalism a huge opportunity for journalists and news orgs?
As watershed events like #iranelection have demonstrated, Twitter, YouTube and other social media are now a tremendous source of on-the-scene reporting and real-time information, but there is also a tremendous amount of noise obscuring the signal.
We’ve seen this show before. Gonzo information on the Internet, film at 11. It’s a classic case of too much noise and too little filter. Nor is it incurable: various people and organizations have stepped into the breach to act as aggregators: bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and the staff of Global Voices Online spring to mind, as well as the New York Times and the Guardian, both of which have used running blogs to cobble the story together from its constituent parts and provide the context to make sense of it all.
Here are some examples of Social Journalism on the Iran Election (click on images to see posts):
The opportunity to curate the real-time web isn’t just for watershed international events. At the local level, people are using Twitter and other social media to bear witness and share information for events in their communities.
For example, earlier this month there was a huge fire at an apartment complex in Renton, Washington. PNWlocalnews.com used Publish2 to round up coverage of the fire, including photos posted on local blogs.
But there was also a a lot information that people on or near the scene were sharing on Twitter:
It would have been great to add tweets like this to the coverage round up of the fire. And now with Publish2’s Social Journalism features, you can do just that.
Simply view the tweet on the web (click the tweet timestamp on Twitter.com and in most Twitter clients), and then click the Link with Publish2 Bookmarklet:
(Click image to see larger.)
Publish2 saves the full text of the Tweet and the Twitter username. Short URLs, usernames, and hashtags are automagically converted to links. As with anything saved to Publish2, you can add a comment and tags, and also add to a newsgroup.
And… you can also share the tweet on Twitter, using Twitter’s native sharing mechanism: retweet. The tweet will automatically be formatted for retweet, and you can edit down the characters before saving and sending to Twitter.
You can then publish curated tweets using a widget or feeds. See an example in the sidebar to the right and on the Publishing 2.0 blog: What We’re Reading on Twitter
So now you can share retweets not just with Twitter followers but also with blog and site readers.
Social Journalism has clear value for breaking news, to curate what’s already being shared on the real-time web. But social media savvy news orgs are also prompting their communities to share their experiences with local events on Twitter.
The recent opening of a light rail system in Seattle prompted this on Seattle Times:
And sure enough, Seattle residents shared their experience with the lightrail opening on Twitter using the #ltrailday1 hashtag:
Another cool feature: Tweets with hashtags are automagically converted to Publish2 tags, making it easy to manage taxonomy (I’ve added some additional tags here):
(Click image to see larger.)
Here’s a roundup of interesting Tweets that I saved to Publish2:
Here’s a widget preview using Publish2’s widget creator (Tweets can be styled separately from comments):
Anyone can post a raw feed of a hashtag (or follow it themselves as a saved search), but that’s essentially pointing the fire hose at your readers. The real value is in helping your readers sip from that fire hose.
In addition to Twitter, our first release of Social Journalism also includes support for YouTube. Here’s a video ride along on Seattle’s light rail:
Which now plays on Publish2:
Twitter and YouTube links are saved along with your other Publish2 links, but you can easily filter them:
We’ve got lots more cool Social Journalism features in the works. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.
Who’s going to be first to curate the real-time web? Ping us on Twitter and we’ll shower you with attention.
I’m pleased to announce the first official release of a project I’ve been working on for a while: a Publish2 plugin for WordPress, the popular Web publishing platform. It lets you to do more with your Publish2 links by extending our collaborative journalism platform to your WordPress blog.
The first feature, Link Assist, allows you to quickly navigate and add your Publish2 links to a blog post as inline links. We wanted to make it easier than ever to access to your Publish2 links when you need them — the ones you’ve been saving as you research your stories and posts, or a collaborative stream of links from a Newsgroup. (No more hunting through 47 browser tabs while writing a post to find a URL!)
Configuration is simple. Add the Publish2 links page of your choice (e.g. “http://www.publish2.com/journalists/daniel-bachhuber/links/“) to your WordPress user profile page, turn on Link Assist, and you’re off to the races. Browse through your links right next to the WordPress post editor and filter them using your Publish2 tags.
Adding a link to your post is as simple as highlighting the text you want linked and clicking the “Add link” button.
The second feature of the plugin is a Publish2 link widget. Use the widget to add your links to a widget-enabled sidebar, or add a link list to any page (check this out in action on Publishing 2.0). For the advanced users, the Publish2 WordPress plugin offers <?php publish2(); ?> as a configurable PHP function you can place in any of your WordPress templates.
The Publish2 link widget is highly customizable, so you can display link elements (i.e. title, publication name, comment) in any order and precisely formatted to match your blog theme.
You may know Ryan Sholin from his widely read and respected blog, Invisible Inkling, where he dishes out insights on the future of news. You may know him as a co-founder of WiredJournalists, a community of over 3,000 journalists helping each other learn and invent the future of news. You may know him as a winner of a Knight News Challenge Grant for ReportingOn, a backchannel for beat journalists to help each other report, and for his posts at Idea Lab. Or you may know him as the Director of Community Site Publishing at GateHouse Media, where he trained hundreds of journalists to succeed on the Web. And, of course, you may be one of his many Twitter followers.
However you know Ryan, you know how much he has done to help journalists innovate, learn, collaborate, and excel. We can’t think of anyone better to do the same for the community of journalists and newsrooms using Publish2 and to play a pivotal role in developing our platform to help journalism survive and thrive in the digital age.
When you look at what Greg Linch has accomplished, it’s hard to believe he’s only now graduating from the University of Miami. As Editor in Chief of the Miami Hurricane, Greg led a complete redesign of the site on WordPress, which included a major shift to breaking news on the web and multimedia reporting. It’s no surprise that Greg is also the Community Director and Core Team Member of CoPress, which is working to create a better technical ecosystem for college news online through community, technical and hosting solutions. Greg has interned at The Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun Sentinel, and he’ll be interning this summer (before joining us) at the Dallas Morning News. He’s also a highly accomplished multimedia reporter, with projects like Special Olympics Live. Greg has been blogging since 2007 at The Linchpen about online journalism and journalism education, and is co-administrator and contributor to the international blogging ring of young journalists, Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists. Greg is also an active member of the Online News Association, Society of Professional Journalists, Florida Press Association, and the Society for News Design. Honors and awards include 2009 Poynter Fellowship for College Journalists, and University of School of Communication Award and Print Journalism Awards (top undergad and top j-student). Phew… Check out Greg’s resume for everything I’ve left out (and Greg on Twitter!).
We received many fantastic entries in our Future of Journalism Contest, and there was a great deal of talent among the top ten finalists. But we jumped at the chance to hire Greg (here’s his winning entry). In everything he does, Greg helps journalism evolve into the future. When he joins Publish2 in the fall, Greg will be telling stories of innovation and helping journalists learn how to use the tools that can help them succeed.
Howard Weaver is of one of the great champions of public service journalism. He served as Vice President, News at The McClatchy Company from 2001-2009, capping a 30-year tenure with the company. In that position he was the chief news executive overseeing 30 daily and more than 50 weekly newspapers, extensive digital and web properties and reporters working in Washington and around the globe. He is a member of the American Society of News Editors and has six times served as a Pulitzer Prize juror. He also serves on the Board of Visitors of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford. Howard twice led the Anchorage Daily News to Pulitzer Prizes; he wrote the stories for which the paper won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service, and was editor and a lead writer on the project for which the paper again won the prize in 1989. He was one of three reporters whose coverage of the Alaska Teamsters Union during construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline won the award in 1976. Howard blogs on journalism at Etaoin Shrdlu and other topics at Quantum Dice; his Twitterstream is @howardweaver.
Howard has been inspiring and guiding our Digital Sunlight initiative. He shares our vision that the future of journalism will combine the power of digital and collaborative technologies with the enduring qualities of professional journalism. We are very fortunate to have his guidance on our Board of Directors.
Publish2 builds technology to enable the future of journalism, but our core belief is that people — journalists — empowered by technology, are the key to that future. That’s why we’re so excited to have such talented people join our team to work with our community of journalists and newsrooms.
Today, with the signing of the largest government stimulus program in history, Publish2 is announcing a new initiative to help newsrooms faced with declining resources continue to play the watchdog role that is so vital in this time of crisis. Digital Sunlight is our code name for a new feature set that will allow citizens to help journalists cover the stimulus act and the other big stories that affect our lives and our communities by submitting tips, leads, anecdotes, questions, etc. into a global searchable database.
In particular, we aim to overcome what we believe is a limitation of many “citizen journalism” initiatives to date, i.e. viewing citizen journalism as an end in itself, where citizens are supposed to replace professional journalists, filling up community sites with reporting. We believe citizen journalism is part of a larger process where professional journalists still play the vital role they always have. The key is to enable dynamic and ongoing collaboration between citizens and professional journalists, where citizens can become a true practical extension of the newsroom.
Ryan Sholin says: This book is a data-focused remix of "Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist," the book Adrian Holovaty often recommends to journalists who want to get started with Django.
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