More than 70 people have tweeted the link so far.

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:

onlinecolleges[dot]net/2010/01/04/10-iconic-journalists-every-jstudent-should-study

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:

• 59.99.25.117 of INDIA claims to be amber.johnson1983@gmail.com reported for SPAM

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.

What to do

It’s important to always open links before you retweet or share them online. It doesn’t hurt to check the short URL or text of a tweet or DM beforehand if it’s suspect.

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.

Bonus link: Craig Kanalley on how to verify a Tweet.

A version of this post can also be found at The Linchpen.

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.

Here’s a quick screencast to get you started. (Try full-screen mode for the full effect.)

For more updates on new Publish2 features and links to great ideas to help bring the best of the Web to your readers, follow Publish2 on Twitter.

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.

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).

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.)

It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connecting information and people: the LINK

“Do what you do best, and link to the rest” is Jeff Jarvis’ motto for newsrooms — the imperative is to reorient newsrooms from a resource-rich, monopoly distribution approach to reporting, where a newsroom could reasonably aim to do it all themselves, to a resource-constrained, networked media reality, where newsrooms must focus on original reporting that matters most — SUPPLEMENTED by links to other original reporting done by other newsrooms — and by individuals.

The idea is that journalists, editors, and newsrooms need to LEVERAGE the web, leverage the network to help them do more — in so many cases now, with less.

But I would take Jeff’s web-savvy advice a step further:

“Make linking to the rest an essential part of what you do best.”

Just as the reported quote is an essential element of journalism, on the web the “reported link” must become an essential element of journalism.

Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review has a practical guide to linking on the web, where he observes:

Ultimately, the addition of useful hyperlinking within an online news story reflects the strong reporting of its author. If a reporter does not know of online pages with extra information relating to the story, he or she cannot link to them. But if you have that information, why not share it with those readers who are eager for it?

Again, I would take this a step further — links aren’t just a fundamental element of the reporting.

Links can BE the reporting.

Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com — still setting records for speed and elegant simplicity of innovation — sent me this example:

Jack took a commodity AP story, available on dozens of other sites…

…and used Publish2′s news aggregation platform to transform it into an original piece by REPORTING on what local TN bloggers were saying about the story. But he didn’t pull a bunch of quotes, as he would in a traditional news story — instead, he LINKED to the sources, creating an order of magnitude more value for a news consumer on the web (who, as Robert Niles says, are “eager for it” — just ask Google).

This is networked journalism — this is LEVERAGING the network.

But Jack wasn’t content to just make links an editorial supplement — for his next trick, he made the links THE STORY:

UPDATE
According to a comment Jack left on a post by Howard Weaver (about this post):

This “article” was in our Top 10 articles on Tuesday for the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites.

Here is a striking example of links supplementing a heroic original reporting effort, and of embracing innovation in the midst of covering deeply challenging news story:

Last week, the Rockford Register Star faced a tragedy in their own backyard with the killings at Northern Illinois University. Rockford did what they do best, reporting literally around the clock to help their shaken community understand what had happened and begin to face the difficult question of why. Their coverage goes on for pages, likely one of the most in-depth collections of original reporting on this story.

But Rockford decided they weren’t just going to provide the very best original reporting their own newsroom could produce. On this national story, with all of its difficult issues, they were going to provide their readers with the very best original reporting ANYWHERE on the web:

You can see next their original reporting a sidebar on the right that provides links to coverage from around the web. As Jack did, the team at Rockford realized that they had gathered a unique — perhaps even definitive — aggregation of coverage from across the web, enough for it to stand on its own:

—-

Quick sidebar on the pace of innovation:

The NIU killings occurred on the afternoon of February 14. I got an email from Rockford assistant managing editor Anna Voelker at 1:30am saying they wanted to aggregate coverage of the tragedy from around the web — and “let’s make this happen.” Andy Brown, Rockford’s web copy editor who lead the charge on gathering links to the best reporting from a wide range of sources, followed up at 4:30am with details of what they needed. Web developer Josh Glovinsky called me around 8am and had the Publish2 headline widget up shortly thereafter. (I never asked how much sleep the newsroom had gotten, but I’m guessing not much.)

Hat tip also to Rockford Executive Editor Linda Grist Cunningham for providing the kind of “let’s do it” support and encouragement that newsroom innovation requires, and to tireless innovation champion Howard Owens for introducing me to Rockford — I’m looking forward to working with rest of their team.

—-

Many news organizations and media companies have been — and some still are — wary of linking to other sites. Why would we send our readers away, the thinking goes, don’t we want them to stay here, on our site?

But that’s the funny thing about web — it’s so counterintuitive. The way it works is almost entirely the opposite of how media used to work.

Whenever I speak to media companies, newsrooms, editors, and journalists about the importance of linking on the web, I always use this example (which almost seems a cliche now, but it gets the point across):

I know of a website that does nothing but send people away — it’s only purposes is to link to other sites. But remarkably, people keep coming back, over and over and over again. Only to be sent away again. In fact, the only reason people keep coming back to this site is because it does such a great job of sending them away.

This site has been so successful at sending people away, that it’s been able to do very well with advertising: ~$15 billion

Can you guess which site?

Of course it’s Google.

Also keep in mind when you think about links as news, links as reporting, and links as editorial product — on the web (thanks in no small part to Google, and its link-based algorithms): Links are influential. Links set the agenda. Links direct public attention. Links connect ideas and people.

Everything journalism has always aspired to do.

Jack explains it best:

Here’s the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet.

A bold statement, but arguably true.

I’m changing up this weekend’s blog roundup to list not what bloggers are posting, but links that bloggers are bookmarking. Think of it as read what they’re reading.

A small group of Tennessee bloggers and journalists are experimenting with a new way of organizing election news in something called the “Publish2 Election News Network.”

It’s a groundbreaking experiment in group collaboration to cover the election and it is happening in Tennessee first.

The bloggers/journalists are using a special Web site to “bookmark” the best coverage they can find on the Tennessee primaries, drawing from any sources, mainstream media sites like newspapers and TV stations and bloggers.

The bookmarks flow into a group list and you can the latest picks here and on other sites like TennViews and KnoxViews (see the left side of both of those sites).

Here’s how participant blogger Joe Powell conceptualized it: ” … we know some people will relay to us some sound and reasoned thought and some people relay less than sound ideas. What’s new is translating that concept into the uses and usage out here on the Wild, Wild Web. It’s more than just adding a human editor to search engine algorithms, it’s also about how we structure and understand the world around us.”

Here are the participants, including Knoxville Blog Network bloggers (some left, some right):

• Jack Lail, Managing Editor/Multimedia, Knoxnews.com, JackLail.com
• Mike Silence, Reporter/Blogger, Knoxnews.com, No Silence Here
• Trace Sharp, Newscoma
• Randy Neal, KnoxViews, TennViews
• Russ McBee, RussMcee.com
• Joe Powell, Cup of Joe Powell
• Ben Cunningham, Taxing Tennessee
• Bob Krumm, BobKrumm.com
• Les Jones, LesJones.com

Call it networked journalism — call it networked news. Also call it a robust editorial product (notice the ads on the knoxnews.com election headline page).

It’s also distributed journalism — I currently have the Knoxnews.com election headlines running in the sidebar to the ride. (We’ve got widgets!)

Newspapers and journalism need more people like Jack who are not afraid to take risks, think big, and turn on a dime to make innovative things happen.

Here’s an overview of the Publish2 Election News Network, which I’ll be updating as it evolves.

It’s not too late to emulate what Knoxnews.com is doing for Tuesday — if you’re interested, email me at scott.karp (at) publish2 (dot) com and I’ll get you set up in snap. It’s free! You can register for Publish2 here.

Publish2′s web-based bookmarking feature will aggregate bookmarks from all participants, which can then be published on their sites with headline links and brief descriptions. Think Digg + del.icio.us, syndicated, with a defined group of users, rather than an open free-for-all (which can be gamed).

There’s a huge opportunity to help voters find the best election coverage in the sea of election content. Yeah, you can do it by yourself — but on the web, the larger the network, the more influential the linking — time to break down those traditional media silos.

And, yes, February 5 is less than a week away — but news organizations can’t afford for innovation to have long lead times. As Yoni Greenabum wrote, “We need to be more nimble, more aggressive; we need to be quicker to act and even quicker to react.”

Jack Lail of jacklail.com and KnoxNews.com took the lead on this idea — we hammered out the technology requirements and he’s been recruiting folks in TN — all in the last 36 hours. I bounced it off Bill Densmore to do it with the New England News Forum, he called me back an hour later, and we were off to the races.

Here’s how it works for a newsroom:

• Round up a group a editors, journalists, and freelancers or affiliated bloggers (e.g. part of your blogger network — we’re aiming to balance left and right)
• Get them all to register for a free Publish2 account — http://publish2.com/register
• Get them to install our browser bookmarklet or toolbar — http://beta.publish2.com/install
• Agree on a common tag, e.g. KnoxNews.com is using “tnelection”
• Starting this weekend and running through next week, get everyone to bookmark interesting election coverage — from ANY source — for your state or from around the country
• Makes sure everyone uses the common tag on their bookmarks (along with any others)
• Publish2 generates feeds of headlines for each tag
• We’ll give you some javascript to publish the headlines on your site — our just take the feeds yourself

Let me know if your newsroom is interested, and we’ll provide support — but you can just do it.

Jack Lail had a great way to describe this in brief — a group link blog.

Here’s Bill Densmore’s description for New England News Forum (if you’re in New England and want to participate through the NENF, you can register here):

Help create a comprehensive source of up-to-the-minute news and commentary on “Super Tuesday.” The New England News Forum is co-ordinating a network of serious news folks — MSM and online/blog/independent — to use Publish2′s online bookmarking tool to submit links to important news and posts leading up to and including Massachusetts and Connecticut “Super Tuesday” primaries. Publish2 will aggregate these links and create RSS feeds that you can then put on your site. Instant aggregation, without the fuss.

“No fuss.” That’s the idea.

You can also think of it as a form of Beat Blogging.

If you’re outside the U.S. covering the election, we’d LOVE to have an international perspective.

If you’re a journalist or freelancer covering politics, and want to participate on your own (perhaps to provide a demonstration for your newsroom), just register and do it. You can use the “2008 U.S. Elections” topic and any tags you want.

Will it work? I dunno. It’s an experiment. We’re in beta. I could have called a committee meeting to commission a study into whether it will work.

Instead we decided to JUST DO IT.

Could we have benefited from more time to plan this on our end? Probably. (Just remembered we need to get the “2008 U.S. Elections” topic in place!) But sometimes you’ve just got to act and lead by example (AKA eat your own dog food).

And we intend to learn from it, continue through the rest of the primary season, conventions, and hopefully keep it going right through November. So if you don’t have time to get involved for Tuesday, this will be ongoing.

Outside of the elections, if you’re interested in connecting your newsroom to the Publish2 network, let me know — it’s free! Email me at scott.karp (at) publish2 (dot) com

Here’s an overview of the concept: http://blog.publish2.com/editors-newsrooms/

And remember — on the web, the power is in the NETWORK.