The New York Times has certainly embraced blogging, but it was striking to see in this post from The Lede just how much they’ve embraced link journalism:

The Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is undoubtedly a big story, which every media outlet is covering, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Google News currently shows 2,580 versions of this story. But when you stop and think about, you have to ask — WHY are there 2,580 versions of this story?

You can hum along […]

How can newsrooms do more online with fewer resources? By leveraging the reporting that bloggers in their communities have ALREADY published on the web. Using “local link journalism,” reporters can seek out and link to reporting on a story that’s been published across their local blogosphere and just needs to be pulled together.

And isn’t pulling […]

The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct huge amounts of traffic on the web.

I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine):
The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good […]

A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.

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