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:

The Copenhagen collaborative newswire appears as part of the new EnviroNation blog at The Nation:

Discover Magazine’s Intersection blog introduced their Copenhagen News Collaborative participation to their readers, pointing out the widget in their sidebar and finishing with this note:

“…there is a lot of Copenhagen news coming, and we stand at a nexus for producing it….”

Updated 12/10/09: The Copenhagen collaborative newswire is now live on TreeHugger’s key page on the climate summit:

Here’s a look at the long list of journalists in the Copenhagen News Collaborative Newsgroup at Publish2:

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.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

“The whole thing came together on Twitter yesterday morning,” Elaine Helm, new media editor at the Herald in Everett, said in an email Thursday.

The story was crazy rain in western Washington: evacuations, flooded and closed highways, avalanches, a breached levee, the whole deal. Elaine (@ehelm on Twitter), put a call out for local Twitterers to adopt a common hashtag for flooding coverage. Paul Balcerak (@paulbalcerak), assistant editor of dynamic media for Sound Publishing, suggested #waflood, which they agreed on and posted for their Twitter followers to see.

As Paul described it in an email, Brianne Pruitt (@briannepruitt, Wenatchee World web editor) and Angela Dice (@adice, Kitsap Sun web editor) picked up on the hashtag, “and it snowballed.”

That would have been innovation enough, but Paul went a step further: He saved links to flood coverage through Publish2, tagging each with “waflood,” and posted on Twitter that he was doing so. Soon Elaine, Angela, and Brianne were also adding links to Publish2 with a “waflood” tag.

They then put Publish2 widgets on their news organizations’ sites that displayed the links they were collaboratively gathering, greatly expanding their sites’ coverage of the flooding.

Here’s the Herald’s link roundup (which is also linked on the Herald’s homepage);

Kitsap Sun’s (inset in a story at left, linked on the homepage at right, and on this full page of links);

Wenatchee World’s (see inset box at left);

and the one at Sound Publishing’s pnwlocalnews.com (see “Washington state flooding” at the bottom).

Voila — instant collaborative link newswire!

The collaborative spirit of journalism’s future

This collaboration is remarkable in all kinds of ways.

First, you can tell by the Twitter timestamps how quickly everything came together. Second, with a link newswire fed by multiple news organizations, there’s a danger that everyone might add only their own stories to the mix. But this group added outside sources as well (including the News Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times, Yakima Herald-Republic, the Daily Record, and more). Third, all four independently and instantly “got” what the others were doing, which shows how much the ideas of collaboration and link journalism (and even the term itself) have spread.

Lastly, did I mention the four journalists work for different media companies? The Herald is owned by the Washington Post Co., Kitsap Sun by Scripps, Sound Publishing by Black Press (of Victoria, B.C.), and Wenatchee World is independent/family-owned. Paul hasn’t met Angela or Brianne in person, and has met Elaine briefly once. Yet none of that was an obstacle.

I asked Angela in an email whether she knew the others in non-Twitter life. Here’s her wonderful answer:

I used to work with Elaine at the Sun and talk to her regularly, and she’s one of the reasons I joined Twitter. While I’d never done any project with Brianne before, she had made it a point to visit other papers around the region and introduce herself when she became the Wenatchee World web editor, which is how I started following her on Twitter. I met Seth Long [Sound Publishing's new media director] on Twitter, which is how I met Paul, neither of whom I’ve met in person. They both, however, work with a former co-worker and friend of mine. It’s a small, small online journalism world in Western Washington.

How refreshing is that? Forget walled gardens — this is the spirit of journalism’s future.

In some ways the networked linking process is an extension of how newsrooms collaborate with traditional wire services, but I think the Washington project is more than that. Papers using a traditional wire service aren’t really collaborating. They’re primarily trying to a) extend the reach of their stories, and b) get access to material they can’t afford to produce on their own.

The dynamic on display Wednesday, and the relationships Angela described in the quote above that allowed for this collaboration, seem more organic — a mental leap forward. They even emphasized the collaboration in the widget descriptions: Kitsap Sun’s says “Stories are chosen by news reporters and editors from Washington news organizations,” while the Herald’s says “Below are news stories that journalists around the state have selected to post using a service called Publish2.”

I asked Seth Long (@greenergrad) about a similar project he and Angela had worked on in December to round up links to snowstorm coverage. (For future Wikipedia articles on link journalism: To my knowledge, theirs was the first example of networked link journalism across media companies.)

He noted that “Her newspaper is a direct competitor with a group of our community weeklies.” In the old world, that would have made collaboration a non-starter. But today readers rightly come first. As Seth said, “My perspective is that our job is to serve our communities as best we can.”

Innovation that’s easy, popular, and cheap

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month. (This tracks with Knoxnews.com’s success with a popular football link roundup.)

Angela described some of the other benefits of collaborative linking:

I think it’s especially useful in situations like these, where events affect a large region. I can also see it being used as a way to track things like state government news, or any broad-reaching issue that your readers will be talking about.

Having a group of people adding the links just makes your job that much easier. As both a reader and a web editor, I can keep updated on what’s happening on a particular topic without opening and slogging through a dozen web sites.

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Doing this isn’t complicated. In an email, Brianne described the extent of her planning: “I follow the others on Twitter, and they had started a hashtag, #waflood, and then mentioned using the same tag for publish2 links.”

That’s it! Any group of news organizations can do this, even if they’re not Twitter-friends.

A good way to start is to set up a Publish2 newsgroup and invite other journalists (as Angela did with a Northwest News newsgroup in December). Collaboratively save links about a couple of non-breaking-news subjects to get a feel for it, and try publishing feeds of those links. Then when a big story breaks, it’s a simple matter of choosing a common tag and alerting everyone in the newsgroup.

Don’t get hung up on worries about sinking a lot of time or money into this. As Angela said, “There’s a perception that with some tools, it’s a lot of extra work, but — I’m specifically talking about the Publish2 model — when you realize how little time it really takes to bookmark a page you’re already reading, it’s a wonder you weren’t doing it before.”

As for money, when the technology is free all you need to invest in is smart journalists. Here’s what Paul had to say Wednesday:

I think it’s worth pointing out that everything we did today cost us $0.

That, too, is the spirit of journalism’s future. I can’t wait to see what this innovative crew cooks up next in that spirit — and who will be the first to follow their lead.

Each editor has a profile on the page with photo, email, Twitter, and links to what they are reading (courtesy of Publish2 widgets). For example, assistant news editor Karen Miller shares interesting links on money and investing, adding her own perspective as context.

Readers can find more of Karen’s great links here. Contributing to this group link blog are Reading’s editor, managing editor, assistant metro editor, web designer, and internet copy editor, so it’s a great cross section of the edit staff’s interests and perspective. Administrative Editor John Boor was one of the catalysts of this initiative:

John explained in an email the thinking behind the What We’re Reading feature, what they have planned, and how they are going about it:

The idea of linking to other news sources and providing a constantly updated list of linked-to stories is one of the goals. We’re hoping to increase our site traffic in our own, smaller way, using the model of “The Drudge Report,” and others who, essentially, create success by being mega-aggregators.

Secondly, we see it as an opportunity to inject more personality into the site. We’re hoping that people will connect with staffers’ faces or names they’ve seen, and maybe keep checking back to see what one of their favorites thinks is important enough to share.

Third, it’s been a while now since I’ve seen the importance of social networking tools, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., not only to aid journalists, but to engage readers and, basically, cast wide, digital nets in an effort to build a sense of community with our news site as the hub. We’d like to encourage a much greater buy-in by those who visit our site, and by using these tools. Publish2 has come along just in time to help us with that. Now, with our “What we’re reading” page(s), we’re not just passing down our own material from our ivory towers. We’re no longer the gatekeepers. We’re stepping out onto the public square and sharing stories that are important to us and hoping they may help others.

Publish2 has given us a way to accomplish this project very easily. We can populate the page dynamically, using the widget you provide on each user’s links page. We just have our staffers register with Publish2 and the rest is pretty much a piece of cake. It is so easy to link from the browser toolbar widget that it takes very little additional time for our staffers to share what they’re reading. In addition to this functionality, we really like the way Publish2 encourages the sharing of links, whether to our own news site or to others’. It’s exciting to me to consider the possibilities. I appreciate your efforts to provide this venue, allowing news organizations to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways, for the public good. It doesn’t hurt, either, that it provides an alternative to the more traditional and expensive ways to procure and disseminate news and other worthwhile information.

There’s so much I love about what Reading is doing. First, that they want to “inject more personality” into their site and build brands around their editorial staff. They are breaking free of the constraints of the newsprint medium, where journalists were faceless, inpersonal bylines. Their edit staff are real people with real interests, who can step “out onto the public square.” And they are taking a truly web-native approach, which has proven successful for publications born on the web — it’s about people and connections.

It’s notable that Reading isn’t spending precious dollars trying to develop their own technology, and they aren’t paying for an algorithm to provide impersonal, semi-relevant links. They are using a free web application to tap into what their journalists are ALREADY reading, adding comments and perspective, and sharing that with their readers. And that’s how they can connect with their readers in a way that no algorithm can — it’s people sharing on the web.

And that gets to another idea I love — using social networking tools to “cast wide, digital nets in an effort to build a sense of community with our news site as the hub” — for example, John is taking the links he contributes to What We’re Reading and simultaneous sharing them on Twitter.

I’m also excited that they see the potential for “an alternative to the more traditional and expensive ways to procure and disseminate news and other worthwhile information.” There is a huge potential for Reading and other newsrooms to collaborate on creating a new newswire for the web, one based on links instead of licensing fees. Imagine the possibilities as more newsrooms join Reading.

This is just the first step for Reading in incorporating link journalism and news aggregation into what they do, as a complement to their own original reporting (and they read that, too!). What’s essential is that they STARTED and have given themselves a basis for learning and innovating. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they come up with.

Reading also shows that the ambition to innovate and the ability to harness technology for editorial innovation is not just the province of the big national newspapers. In fact, Reading is making better use of technology to easily and collaboratively scale up their news aggregation efforts than some big media companies that are still using some rather old-fashioned editorial processes for link journalism.

My post about the success of the Drudge Report was widely read, but here’s a newsroom that didn’t just read about harnessing the power of news aggregation on the web — they are actually going to DO it.

So why aren’t you doing it?

Thompson started a blog devoted to exploring an alternative. He writes in the introductory post:

Until recently, newspaper editors defined news as “important developments over the past 24 hours.” … My understanding of journalism is broader. To me, journalism is the constant effort to deliver a truer picture of the world as it is. The “latest developments” provide one lens through which to capture that picture. And as long as journalism was primarily delivered by static media, that lens made perfect sense.

The Web, however, makes possible other ways of delivering that picture of our evolving world. It allows us to shirk the tyranny of recency and place more emphasis on context – the information that often gets buried beneath the news.

Jarvis takes the idea further:

[A] discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.

[snip]

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. … I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed.

I agree with both of them. (Disclosure: Matt’s a friend, and Jarvis is on the board of Publish2, where I’m an editor.) But there’s an ink-stained elephant in the room that needs to be faced if Thompson’s feeling that “we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism” is to come true.

I’m talking, of course, about the Associated Press.

The AP plays a major, but often unacknowledged, role in the modern news ecosystem. Aside from the handful of papers that can still afford a worldwide or national reporting staff, most papers’ non-local coverage draws heavily from the AP (sometimes supplemented by wire services from Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times, McClatchy, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.).

This coverage is important — AP is usually the first to report on major stories, particularly in out-of-the-way places. But it has also contributed to the spread of what, in my work as a wire editor, I came to think of as AP’s house style: voiceless (the Ron Fournier Effect notwithstanding), incrementally updated, process-oriented, one sentence of “news” stretched to 12 paragraphs.

Such stories aren’t always engaging or interesting, nor are they effective in providing understanding. Without context, they can induce news overload. As Jay Rosen recently wrote:

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most “basic” acts are reporting today’s news and providing current information, as with prices, weather reports and ball scores. We think of “analysis,” “interpretation,” and also “explanation” as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior reports. … That’s the way it works… right?

Wrong! For there are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I’ve picked up a blinking red light from the news system’s repeated placement of “subprime” items in front of me.

None of this is meant to denigrate individual AP journalists, who do tons of great and important work. The issue is institutional — as much a function of objectivity-era daily journalism as of house style.

Meanwhile, the Internet’s depth and variety have made newspapers’ pool of wire sources look increasingly shallow.

For any given story, the most interesting and informative takes often come from sources other than the traditional newswires. On any given day, the stuff that actually makes people smile (when was the last time a newspaper made that a goal?) is found not on the AP wire, but in viral videos, Cute Overload photos, and Best Week Ever posts.

The longer newsrooms ignore this amazing universe of content, the less relevant they are for readers. The longer the AP fails to help newsrooms find this content, the less useful it will be. A content-sharing service is a good start, but I think the AP — like other wire services — fundamentally misunderstands what a web-era newswire needs to offer. (Though in fairness, most AP member papers are still focused on print.)

Not just more in-house niche content, but more of the best content from all over the web, regardless of the source: More engaging one-off stories and ephemera, as well as more relevant and understandable analysis and context.

The AP’s not alone; no wire service covers papers large and small, blogs, magazines, and web sites. But on the web you don’t need to pay anyone to help you bring great stories to readers. All you have to do is link.

Finding all this material is another matter. Individual bloggers do their part each time they link, but there hasn’t been a good way to aggregate the blogosphere’s links.

That’s the real mission of a wire service for the web era: Not to provide full-text versions of a single source’s (or handful of sources’) news, but to offer links to the best stuff culled from ALL sources.

And since nobody’s doing that, we’re going to give it a shot. Call it the web’s newswire, version 1.0; Publish2 as the new AP.

I’ve created a Publish2 newsgroup called The Wire. Armed with a packed RSS reader, I’ll be saving links on all manner of topics from all kinds of sources. The goal is to provide a thorough, interesting, and engaging wire for news organizations that want to start moving beyond the AP or are forced to do so for budgetary reasons.

This link wire could be an answer for editors like Steve Buttry of The (Iowa) Gazette, who writes, in a recent cancellation letter to the AP, “I don’t know yet how The Gazette will operate without AP content.”

Imagine this scenario: The print edition of The Gazette becomes “an all-local newspaper” supplemented by content-sharing, as Buttry suggests in his letter. And every day the paper includes a note to readers:

“We’re still going to cover non-local stories, but in a new way. On our website, we’re linking to the best of these stories –- from many sources, not just the narrow range we used to print — to try to make the news more understandable, engaging, and interesting.”

Meanwhile, The Gazette has set up web sections of curated links to the best national, international, business, entertainment, sports, etc. news and commentary — links drawn initially from feeds of The Wire’s tag pages. The Gazette could even publish a Drudge Report-type page of The Wire’s links on all topics.

Voila: not just sustained but improved coverage, without having to pay a cent.

This is not an argument to kill the AP. Indeed, any thorough link wire would certainly include AP stories. This is an argument about the centrality of AP-type stories in the web-news mix, and the utility of the AP as a distribution mechanism for web-focused news organizations.

I realize that one person acting as editorial gatekeeper goes against any number of principles of web journalism. Ultimately, this newswire will be powered by the collective editorial judgment of thousands of journalists linking stories. (Anyone who would like to contribute or suggest links is welcome to ping me at josh [dot] korr [at] publish2 [dot] com.)

For that to happen, there needs to be a shift not only in the conception of a wire service, but also in the conception of the link itself.

Journalists need to understand that finding and curating links is as important to web journalism as original reporting. They need to understand once and for all that linking is journalism.

This is why algorithm-based link services are not the answer. It takes human intelligence and judgment to turn a flood of information into a coherent news story (i.e. reporting); it takes the same intelligence and judgment to turn a flood of news stories into a coherent body of links.

That’s the radical evolution Matt Thompson senses is at hand: Journalists using their expertise and judgment to filter the web and make the news make sense.

Links make context- and topic-focused journalism possible — not to mention journalism that’s surprising and fun instead of predictable and boring. All we need is a way to find those links and make them accessible to all news organizations.

So let’s get to it.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ll be fleshing out this vision further on the Publish2 blog.

Scanning the financial press this morning, readers would have seen a disturbing yet familiar burst of oil news: rising prices, aghast lawmakers and protests in Europe. But another piece of bad news topped off the fray, one that was much less familiar to close observers of the oil market:

If that’s an accurate assessment, prices are going to have to double another couple of times to bring demand into line with supply,” Kevin Drum wrote at The Washington Monthly. “$500 oil, anyone?”

Already, a financial blogger was out of the gate with a renewed call to boost domestic oil production

What prompted the new jump? It’s never an easy question to answer, as The Washington Post explained in its lead coverage today

As for today’s uptick to $135, another report from Bloomberg News blamed traders engaged in wrong-way betting. The wrong bet, by the way, was for cheaper oil.

As Milton Ezrati, senior strategist at money manager Lord Abbett, told USA Today: “It’s the next black beast.”

Wow, just look at all the third-party sources linked here: Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, USA Today, and an independent blogger! The value for the reader here is enormous — not only do they get Times blogger Mike Nizza’s framing and perspective, they get links to all of this original reporting and analysis on this issue.

It’s great to see “the newspaper of record” has so evolved on the web — gone are the days when they to claim they have the last word on a topic or issue. The Times realizes that there is a rich universe of journalism on the web, and they can best serve their readers by helping them find the best reporting, alongside the NYT’s own gold standard reporting.

Here’s an example of why this isn’t just linking, but link JOURNALISM:

The Post article didn’t mention the new estimate on the future of crude. But Bloomberg News tacked it on to the end of an article suggesting that, far from being to blame for the soaring cost of oil, OPEC was in fact powerless to control it, according to one official:

OPEC has “no magic solution’’ to the surge, Qatar’s oil minister said. Prices are “out of the hands’’ of the organization, according to Libya’s top oil official.

Nizza isn’t just lazily linking to these stories — he’s read them, compared them, identified shortcomings, extracted key facts and issues, and connected the dots.

In a traditional newspaper article, all of these facts and analysis would have been synthesized, but the reader wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read for themselves the source material. This post does what journalism is supposed to do — empower people with facts, understanding, and perspective about important issues.

And the Times has clearly gotten over the red herring fear of “sending people away.” The Lede has helped readers make sense of what they read elsewhere, helping to make the Lede more essential than those other source. In my case, the Lede actually helped me figure out what else to read on this issue — by sending me to high quality sources on a topic of interest, as Google does, the Lede has ensured that I’m going to come BACK for more.

In other words, the Times has given me a reason NOT to go to the WSJ or The Washington Post first, and instead come here first — linking to your competitors is a great way to disintermediate them.

I found this Lede post on the front page, as a supporting item to the original reporting for the print newspaper:

The print story quotes lot’s of sources, but of course it has no links, so the reader has only the information that fits in the article. Readers of Nizza’s link journalism piece, on the other hand, have the wealth of many different sources.

But I think the two pieces complement each other well — the New York Times should look for ways to integrate them more tightly.

I’m waiting for the day when NYTimes.com is bold enough to feature a blog post as a top headline on its homepage, and end the content caste system that separates its print journalism from its online journalism.

I’m curious to learn more about Mike Nizza, who did all of this great link journalism. Too bad he’s just an empty byline with no identity on NYTimes.com. Oh well, I guess the NYT still hasn’t fully evolved on the web (hint: the web is about PEOPLE — and journalists are people, too).

There’s no such thing as a local website.

Think about it for a minute.

There are websites that publish CONTENT pertaining to a particular locality — but a local WEBsite is an oxymoron, because all websites exist on the WORLD WIDE web, i.e. any website can be accessed (barring censorship) anywhere in the world.

A local newspaper, in contrast, is only distributed in a limited geographic region. Before the web, if a local newspaper reported a story of national significance, there were two ways for that story to get national distribution:

1. A wire service distributed and/or rewrote the story
2. A national news brand re-reported (and/or rewrote) the story

That was the solution to the problem of physical distribution — but now, local news content published on the web by a local news brand can be accessed anywhere in the world.

And yet it isn’t — because now the distribution problem isn’t a physical limitation, but instead a problem with ATTENTION. There is no way for that story to get attention on the web outside of the audience who already visits the local news brand’s website because they know the brand locally.

But what if there were a way for a local story on a local news brand’s website to get national attention?

And what if there were a way to do it without the help of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, New York Times, or any other national brand?

Well, there is way…

A local news brand’s content could get national attention on the web if every other local news brand linked to it on their websites.

Huh?

Let me take a step back to explain. I’ve been writing a lot about link journalism, a way that journalists can enhance their original reporting and even create a new type of original editorial content by linking to other content on the web.

Because journalists don’t link to anything, they are completely disenfranchised from the web’s link driven distribution system.

But what if journalists did start to link… to each other.

Bloggers have been doing this for years, which is why some top bloggers have better distribution on the web than many journalists.

Ryan Sholin has a list of top blogs that journalists should emulate in their effort to become web-native reporters — most of Ryan’s suggestions are masters of link blogging.

Now imagine if 1,000 newspapers where actively link blogging about issues of local importance — and linking to each other’s reporting on the same issues as part of their link journalism effort.

For example, take the killings at Northern Illinois University, a tragedy of national interest. This event happened in Rockford Register Star’s backyard, and they reported the story from a unique local perspective.

Now imagine if local news brands around the country, as part of their coverage, linked to Rockford’s reporting — and to reporting by the Daily Chronicle in Dekalb, and reporting from other Illinois papers.

If enough newspaper sites around the country did this, the original reporting by these local news brands could have effectively gotten national distribution.

Here’s a less dramatic example. Let’s say you’re a local journalist assigned to report on concerns about local water quality. A simple search on Google news reveals local stories on water quality from across the country, fodder for a great link journalism piece to complement original reporting on how the issue presents in your locality.

But the result would be that your link journalism drives traffic to other local sites — put another way, your journalism would contributing to the national distribution of the reporting by those other local journalists, on the issue of water quality.

It’s national distribution, using a distributed model, i.e. distributing content across hundreds of localities adds up to national distribution. (Yeah, it takes a while to wrap your brain around that.)

But not only is it national distribution, it’s content targeted distribution — you’re directing people interested in a topic to other content on that topic.

This is just scratching the surface, but here’s the key — local newspapers need to reinvent their business model. And the current business model is failing because it’s based on a shrinking distribution model.

So how do you reinvent the business model?

First you need to reinvent the distribution model.

(Shameless plug: Imagine if there were an easy way for journalists to share with each other links to their best reporting, and to vote up the best local reporting on issues of common interest, kind of a Digg for journalists, editors, and newsrooms, where they could combine the power of their links and create a new distribution network — then local news brands could really drive large quantities of traffic to each other’s reporting.)

You can hum along with the refrain — in traditional media, with monopoly local print and broadcast distribution channels, each news brand had to run their own version of a major story, because it was the only way for local residents to get the news.

On the web, this makes… no… sense.

There is obviously a huge original reporting opportunity here — NYtimes.com, for example, has been publishing pages and pages of facts over the last 24 hours.

Just as every blogger is entitled to voice an opinion, every mainstream news brand can reasonably publish an opinion piece.

But seriously, how many times can this story be re-reported, rewritten and repackaged? (Spent a few hours sifting through Google news if you want to know the actual answer to this question.)
Pity the poor news consumer who wanted to go beyond the obligatory me-too coverage they find in their favorite news brand.

There is a HUGE opportunity for news brands to redefine what they do for such “media frenzy” stories — to focus on helping news consumers find the BEST coverage of the story.

Imagine the problem at the extreme — 2,580 undifferentiated choices via Google News. Where do you start?

To put it another way, there is a huge opportunity to pioneer original link journalism — an opportunity that, interestingly, the New York Times, with it’s virtuoso original reporting, completely missed in this piece: From Public and Blogosphere, Shock

For example:

Dealbreaker.com, a popular Wall Street gossip site, which seemed to have a field day with the announcement, ran the news under a headline that is too vulgar to print in a family newspaper.

“Oh and the waves of laughter booming across the trading floor as the headline pops up on Bloomberg,” wrote one commenter on the Web site, referring to the Bloomberg news service. “Oh dear. We needed this to lighten up the day.”

Other commenters on Dealbreaker.com echoed the apparent sense of glee on Wall Street, calling the news “amazing,” “the greatest story ever,” and “a dream.” One person complained about Mr. Spitzer’s vague apology and apparent requests for privacy.

Or

One person who posted a note on the Huffingtonpost.com, which is known for its political commentary, said that Mr. Spitzer’s announcement today was especially disappointing because he had served as a model to other prosecutors.

“I feel really sad about this,” the anonymous poster wrote. “I respected Gov. Spitzer and the work he has done to fight greed and shady Wall Street ethics in New York. I live in Connecticut, and it is often said that our attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, is trying to model himself in Spitzer’s image. No longer, I guess.”

Or

On the political Web site Politico.com, the question of what, if any, effects this would have on the presidential race seemed to dominate the discussion.

“Separate and apart from which Democrat you may like to see in the White House, this is not good for Hillary,” one poster on Politico.com wrote. “Eliot’s as close a confidant and superdelegate as she has, a staunch supporter and governor of her home state. Meanwhile Hillary’s been running uphill hard all along to keep this sort of thing away from her.”

Umm… instead of linking to the mains site domains, how about linking to the ACTUAL STORIES?

No seriously, this is a mind blowing failure of online journalism. And you know what happened here — this piece was written for print, and no one could be bothered to do what would best serve web readers, which is link to the actual pieces being quoted.

To serve print readers first and web readers not at all is the tail wagging the dog — but it’s great news for other news brands. If the New York Times drops the ball, then other news sites can pick it up.

(Yoni Greenbaum highlighted some other bad link journalism, and Brian Murley at Innovation in College Media has also written about the problem.)

So here’s the challenge to all of you editors and journalists reading this — if your readers wanted to know what the five or even the three pieces on the Spitzer scandal most worth reading, what would you tell them? Do reporters have the skills to do a better job than the New York Times on the link journalism piece?

Here’s something else to think about. Each news brand could go off in its corner and decide on the five Eliot Spitzer stories most worth reading. But that’s still, in effective, an old media silo. It isn’t leveraging the web as a network.

Here’s the really interesting question — what are the five Eliot Spitzer stories according to EVERY news brand covering it via link journalism? What’s the collective judgment of the hundreds of news brands swarming over this story on who’s got the best coverage?

(Shameless plug: That’s why we build Publish2 — to create the network that can figure this out. If you’re interested in contributing to the collective editorial wisdom on who’s got the best Eliot Spitzer coverage, you can register for Publish2 and make your vote count.)

And isn’t pulling together the threads of a story what journalists do?

For example, this weekend it snowed in Tennessee — in March — not exactly a common occurrence. It’s a great old fashioned human interest story. Knoxnews.com published a news story with the facts about the storm. But what about how it’s affecting people in the community? Traditionally, that would mean sending a reporter out to do interviews and a photographer to take pictures… in the snow. Or it would mean making do with some wire copy and photos.

But the beauty of the web is people in the community were already posting their thoughts and pictures online. So all Knoxnews.com had to do was link to them (using Publish2, of course).

And what do these links capture? How the community experienced the storm, why it’s significant, and… pictures:

Finally! | shoutingforha

A miracle has happened! It is snowing in Tennessee… in March no less. Just when I thought Spring was right around the corner, Winter has made a comeback. I am practically giddy about it.

You may be wondering why I am so excited. After all, snow is a regular part of Winter, right? Well, if you live in Tennessee, snow is almost non-existent. According to my very scientific calculations, Tennesseans will enjoy a significant snowfall (minimum 2 inch accumulation that stays on the ground for 2 or more hours before melting) every 4.5 years. How pitiful is that?

Snow | Shoot The Moose

I know others snicker at our reaction to snow in middle Tennessee – I do not care. This is magic, every minute to be savored.

Snow of any measurable amount, around here, is fleeting and rare. For places north and west, by this time of year there is a snow-weariness; a been-there-done-that kind of attitude. To be honest, I wouldn’t blame a northerner for feeling that way.

But not here. The whole town seems to be wrapped up in a breathless giddiness. The television news reporters, ever since last night, have seemed like they were going to burst with anticipation. It’s like a million people, all at once, were filled with the joy and anticipation of a night before a big trip to Disney World. Laugh at us, if you will – but when was the last time you and all of your neighbors felt giddy? Could heaven be like this?

Biggest Snowfall in Five Years | From Where I Sit:

It snowed steadily all evening. When Gail and I went to bed it was still snowing—big beautiful flakes. I woke up at 6:30, scurried outside, and snapped a few photos before anyone spoiled the thick white blanket with foot prints.

I realize that these modest snowfalls make northerners laugh. But when you live in the south, you take what you can get. This is the latest snowfall we have had since 1996. It is also the biggest snowfall we have had since 2003. My guess is that we had about three inches in Franklin.

SNOW! | The Schlog

I took these pictures at 9:30 tonight…the kids wanted to go outside “right now!” We have about 2 inches so far…not bad for middle Tennessee. We have the snowpants, boots, socks and gloves all ready for a morning in the snow!

MORE SNOW!!! | Ridley

We got about 4 or 5in. of snow last night here in Ashland City. I dont think Nashville got near this much. That is what we get for living north of Nashville!! Well, I tried to find a sled all day yesterday but didnt succeed, so I had to “redneck it”, which I am not ashamed to do!! Lucy is sledding on a Tupperware lid! She didnt really like it but looked too cute! Jason says she looks like a gay leopard in this jacket!

Sure, this was just weather, but if you read through the blog posts, you’ll see that it really touched people deeply — and it was a shared community experience.

Newspapers should aspire to be a hub for shared community experiences — and that’s what the link journalism piece on Knoxnews.com did, by presenting as a shared experience what would otherwise be disconnected blog posts. And it was a perfect complement to the reader comments posted on Knoxnews.com’s news piece on the storm. (Some people post on Knoxnews.com — others post on their own blogs.)

Who else is going tie all these threads together? It made perfect sense for Knoxnews.com to do it.

There’s so much opportunity on the web — it’s just a matter of seizing it.

So how can the web make LESS work for journalists rather than more? Which weekend assignment would you have rather had?

Write human interest feature on the storm from scratch, call up people to annoy them for quotes, and then run the AP photo

OR

Read the stories and browse the compelling images already being posted across your local blogosphere, and create a quick link journalism piece to capture it

The web doesn’t have to be harder for journalism — it can be much, much easier — it’s just a matter of learning how to use the web.

But first lets look at how the concept of link journalism has been refined and supported:

From Josh Cantone at ReadWriteWeb:

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they’re being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

Mindy McAdams points to the example of Joshua Micah Marshall’s link journalism on Talking Points Memo, which recently receive a George Polk Award in journalism:

In providing links to diverse reports appearing in many different locations, TPM’s Marshall and his colleagues demonstrated the authority of their analysis that particular U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for political reasons.

Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the “journalism of assertion,” the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.

Jack Lail shares his own experience with link journalism:

I’ve been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.

The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link “article” was the No. 1 “story” on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.

All of these observations support the substantive journalistic value — and content value — of links in the context of a specific reporting effort, i.e. the link journalism equivalent of a news article.

But what’s the link journalism equivalent of the entire newspaper?

That’s were networked link journalism comes into play.

Networked link journalism is combining all the links created by journalists practicing link journalism to determine that most important, interesting, and newsworthy content that journalists are linking to.

In the simplest form of networked link journalism, one link = one vote. The stories with the most votes rise to the top.

This is the newspaper of the future — or rather the newspaper of today. This is how Google works, and how Digg works, by combining the power of many links.

What’s on a Google search results page? Or Digg’s homepage? A bunch of links.

But not just any links — the “best” links.

Why do some many people go to Google and Digg to click on those links? Why do they drive so much traffic on the web?

Because those links are determined by networks, not individuals — and networks are the most powerful force on the web.

An individual practicing link journalism can drive tens or, in the case of top link blogger/journalists, hundreds of visits for each link. The uber link journalists like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan can drive a few thousand. Matt Drudge, the exception that proves the rule, can drive many thousands.

It’s all a matter of scale.

Journalists practicing link journalism in isolation can influence content distribution on the web (which most journalists are not doing at all), but only to a limited degree.

Journalists practicing networked link journalism, on the other hand, could have a huge influence over content distribution on the web — if enough journalists participated, they could drive enough traffic to crash servers.

We created Publish2 as a platform for networked link journalism, to give journalists and news organizations the power online that they once had offline — the power of distribution, the power of Google and Digg on the web — a power that, completely counter to the monopoly distribution model, journalism can only have collectively.

Remember the rule of networks on the web — the bigger the network, the more powerful it is.

There’s much more to this vision — such as a solution to the problem of rampant gaming that plagues Digg and Google, and the value of link journalism as content (as Jack has discovered) — but I want to see if the networked link journalism meme catches first. (If at first you don’t succeed, try another meme.)

The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.

Much of that story has been reported over the years, but it was still worth pulling together to help voters in 2008 better understand the John McCain who might be their next president.

Instead of focusing on unsubstantiated allegations of an affair, how might the NYT have better served readers and voters by “pulling together” a story that has been “reported over the years”? If they took a traditional approached, they would summarize that reporting in their own words, such that readers would only see what could fit in the limited number of column inches available.

But on the web, with its infinite space and connectedness, the Times could have added an important supplement to their own perspective in recounting the history of McCain ethics since 1991:

LINKS to the the actual reporting that has been done over the years.

For the occasion, I’m going to coin a new term: link journalism

It’s what I attempted to describe the other day in the post on Links As News, Links As Reporting.

Link journalism is linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalist’s original reporting.

As a commenter on my last post observed, link journalism is not new on the web — bloggers have been pioneering it for years — but it is new to many journalists who have been largely focused on the print medium and are just now learning the ways of the web.

So what might the link journalism for that NYT piece on McCain ethics look like? I don’t have the time or resources of the four journalists who reported the original NYT piece, but here are a few links I pulled together on Publish2 (I’m currently displaying these headlines in the sidebar of the Publishing 2.0 blog using our widget).

Time: The Power and The Story
Far from making him more sensitive, the Keating Five scandal was a near death experience that changed the way he saw himself and the system. McCain had been at best a reformer junior grade. In fact, he voted against campaign-reform measures before being sucked into the sewer himself.

Boston.com: Pluck, Leaks Helped Senator to Overcome S&L Scandal
A decade ago, Senator John McCain’s role in the most politically corrosive episode of the $150 billion savings and loan debacle threatened to end a political career that now holds some promise of concluding instead with a McCain presidency.

Star Tribune: Campaign 2000; To compete, McCain takes cash from the very system he abhors
Now, as he runs for president as a white knight crusading to rid politics of “corrupt money,” his campaign’s chase for cash is tinged with irony: He is building relationships that, perhaps unavoidably, rekindle images of his Keating Five days.

BBC News: The gloves come off
In 2000 Republican Primary, the Bush campaign attacked McCain over his 1991 Senate Ethics Committee reprimand.

Arizona Republic: DeConcini’s memoir details tense relationship with McCain
In Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle, the former senator reflects on when he, McCain and three other senators were investigated by the Senate ethics committee in 1991.

Reason Magazine: How John McCain Reformed
In 1991 Sen. John McCain was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for his “poor judgment” in meeting with federal bank regulators who were investigating Arizona businessman Charles Keating, one of his campaign contributors. Ever since then, McCain has been trying to show he is not a hack politician kowtowing to special interests but a man of integrity and principle.

The standard journalistic technique for providing context and support for assertions is to quote sources, but on the web, the “link journalism approach” is to link to other actual reporting.

To support the assertion that concerns over McCain’s ethics have a long back story, which voters in 2008 should know about, what better than actually linking to the body of reporting that covered this story in the past?

Not sufficiently intrigued by this concept? Let me up the ante.

Check out these two articles from the 2000 campaign, the last election cycle when McCain ran:

Boston.com: Pluck, Leaks Helped Senator to Overcome S&L Scandal

Star Tribune: Campaign 2000; To compete, McCain takes cash from the very system he abhors

Oh wait… you can’t. Unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege.

The rationale for paid access to newspaper and other print publication archives is that researchers and other people searching for archived articles for a specific purpose will be willing to pay for them — the archives don’t generate enough traffic to monetize through advertising, so why not charge for them?

A Google News archive search for “McCain Keating” for 2000 reveals lots of reporting potentially relevant to today’s voters, but it’s all locked behind a pay wall:

Well, what if link journalism could transform the newspaper archive from a dusty locked vault to a vibrant, dynamic part of up-to-the-minute news reporting?

Suddenly, a site like Time.com starts look really smart for making available for free this in-depth piece on McCain from December 1999: The Power and The Story

Imagine what link journalism could do to increase traffic to high quality journalism, old and new.

How do you save important journalism? Make it relevant again using the currency for relevancy on the web: links

Oh, speaking of traffic, what about the concern that link journalism will “send people away” from a newsroom’s own original reporting?

Just remember Google’s law of links on the web — the better job you do at sending people away, the more they come back.

Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com has created a regular feature on their Govolsextra.com by aggregating “Blogger Buzz” — these stories that do nothing but “send people away” have been regularly making the top 10 story list:

Jack tells me that one of these Blogger Buzz “send them away” link journalism stories this week was the #1 story on the site.

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If you’re an editor or reporter and want to check out the McCain Ethics page I created, you can register for Publish2 and see it here. You can add to it simply by using the tag “McCain Ethics” — here’s the McCain Ethics tag page feed. If you’re interested in joining the Publish2 Election News Network — or using Publish2 for other news aggregation features on your site — email me at scott.karp at publish2 dot com