Perhaps that was true to a larger extent in the past. But having spent a lot of time working with newsrooms, I can tell you that by and large this is no longer case. The problem is not one of attitude or ignorance, but rather the more mundane yet still hugely significant problem of technology and workflow. And it’s a much bigger problem than most people discussing the issue realize — so much so that the solution has not been obvious.

Fortunately, there is a solution. But first, for the sake of broader understanding, let’s fully flesh out the problem.

Here’s how Brian Boyer at the Chicago Tribune explained it:

At the Chicago Tribune, workflows and CMSs are print-centric. In our newsroom, a reporter writes in Microsoft Word that’s got some fancy hooks to a publishing workflow. It goes to an editor, then copy, etc., and finally to the pagination system for flowing into the paper.

Only after that process is complete does a web producer see the content. They’ve got so many things to wrangle that it would be unfair to expect the producer to read and grok each and every story published to the web to add links.

The solution seems obvious — switch to a web-centric workflow by creating all of the content in the web CMS first. Most web CMSs make it easy to add links, or at least much easier than newspaper print editorial systems, many of which don’t even accept HTML.

While many newsrooms do now publish breaking news on the web first, there are two big reasons why newspaper newsrooms can’t easily ask all of their reporters to write all of their stories in the web CMS first:

1. Web CMSs don’t handle multi-stage editorial workflows

As Brian pointed out, after a reporter finishes a story, it needs to go to an editor and then to a copy editor. Most Web CMSs are not designed to handle this workflow. You can’t set story status to track where is in the workflow. Editors can’t be notified that stories are ready for review, or are ready for copy editing. Reporters can’t be notified that revisions are required. You can’t manage story assignments. You can’t customize the workflow in any way.

I’ve actually heard many web-native editorial operations complain about this limitation, even in a flexible CMS like WordPress. Daniel Bachhuber actually developed a plugin for WordPress, called EditFlow, to solve this workflow problem (which is great, if you use WordPress as your primary web CMS, which most newspapers don’t).

But why on earth, you might ask, do these newsrooms need all of this editorial process? Why do they need layers of editors and copy editors? Most web-native publishers let their writers post directly to web. If there are mistakes, they can just update the content in real time, fix typos, post corrections, etc.

That’s how web publishing works. But it’s not how print publishing works.

In print, you only get one chance to get it right. Publishing content as a continuously updated process works great when you can update in real time, but not when you have to wait until the next day to post the correction, at which point it’s really too late.

And there’s another big difference between publishing on print and publishing on the web — finite space. If a reporter files a story, and there’s not enough space for it, somebody needs to make it fit on the page. Because the web has infinite space, web CMSs were not designed to accommodate a workflow that requires making the content fit the available space.

Lastly, there’s one more major difference between a print workflow and a web workflow — press deadline. You’ve got to print the newspaper, and everything needs to be ready to go by the time the presses roll. On the web, you can publish on a rolling basis, 24/7. But for print, it only happens once a day, which by its nature requires a more complex, coordinated process.

It’s certainly open to debate how many editorial layers are really necessary for creating the print product. Many newsrooms have been forced to reduce the number of layers as the result of cost reduction cutbacks. But it’s simply not practical for most newsrooms to produce the print product without a system that can handle an editorial workflow with some degree of sophistication.

2. Web CMSs don’t support the print layout process

Creating the newspaper print product is, fundamentally, about traditional desktop publishing. Layout and design is done typically in InDesign or Quark. And most newspaper workflows are based on a process for easily getting content into page layout.

A key function of the print editorial system is to flow content, properly formatted, onto pages in InDesign and Quark. These systems can also sync edits made on the designed page (e.g. making it fit) back into the database. Many of these systems handle high resolution photos, also necessary for print, but not the web.

Bottom line — newspapers can’t simply throw out their print editorial systems and just use their web CMS for everything, simply because it’s easier (or even possible) to create links in the web CMS.

That brings us to another seemingly obvious solution: Why not create all content in the web CMS first, then simply import it into the print editorial system for the print workflow.

Newsrooms actually have a term for this: Reverse publishing

You could make a strong argument that it’s time to “reverse the polarity” of publishing, as newsrooms transform for a digital future.

There’s just one problem — there’s no way to get content from the website into the print editorial system. Most print CMSs can’t import RSS feeds, because they were all designed based on the assumption that content flows in the other direction. Print editorial systems are typically desktop applications that don’t natively connect to the web. (This, by the way, is why it’s so difficult for web publishers to deliver content to newspaper partners — subject for another post.)

The newsrooms that do publish web first are typically reduced to copying and pasting content from the web CMS into the print editorial system.

So even if a newsroom reverses the polarity of its publishing priorities, the technology doesn’t make it easy.

Until now.

The Solution

Publish2 has solved this problem, with a very counterintuitive approach. We’ve developed support for delivering content into print editorial systems using the import function that these systems were designed to use — receiving content from a traditional newswire.

To deliver content into print editorial systems, Publish2 uses the formats and delivery mechanisms that are completely unknown outside of newspaper newsrooms and foreign to anyone who only publishes on the web (ANPA, NITF, I won’t bore you with the details).

Using the Publish2 Print-Digital Integration module, newspapers are able to create content in the web CMS, publish web and digital first, and then easily flow all the content into the print editorial system. We strip out the HTML for print, so reporters can link as much as they want in the web version. We can also deliver the content into the archiving system.

And we can do it all without any change to the existing systems, and without the significant expense of throwing out the old system and buying a new one.  So there’s no throwing out the baby with the bathwater to adopt a digital first publishing workflow. This solution also has the benefit of freeing up web producers from a lot of copy/pasting and other manual workflow to spend more creating original web content and features.

The result is that the only barrier to change is a willingness to change. And that is a barrier that most newsrooms, as a matter of survival, have already overcome.

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.

But what about when you’re not reading news on a news site? What if you do your daily reading in a feed reader like Google Reader? What a hassle to have to open the feed item in the browser in order to save it to Publish2.

Not anymore.

You can now import Shared Items on Google Reader as links on Publish2!

If you use the Share with Note feature in Google Reader, your note is imported as a comment on Publish2. You can automatically send Shared Items to a Publish2 Newsgroup, which can be used for collaborating with other journalists and/or publishing the links to your site. You can share your imported links with other journalists on the Publish2 Newswire or save them to My Research to use for your reporting.

You can add tags to imported links automatically — great if you set up a Shared Items page based on a tag in Google Reader. You can also send links to your My Research page, or subscribe to your own feed and save your best work to My Clips.

And it gets better.

You can automatically send Google Reader Shared Items to Twitter and Delicious!

It’s easy to set up. You can set up links to be imported automatically, or you can manually import links after you’ve caught up on your feed reading.

All you need to do is enter the URL of your Google Reader shared items. In Google Reader, just click on Shared Items in the left navigation:

Then click on “See your shared items page in a new window.” The URL in the window that pops up is what you put in Publish2 to get it set up.

We’re excited about Google Reader because a feed reader is a very efficient way to consume news from many different sources. Feed readers are increasingly an essential tool for journalists, whether for staying on top of their beats or taking on the role of information filter. (And that’s why every page of links on Publish2 has a feed!)

Now you can practice link journalism directly from your feed reader.

Here are some initial reactions:

Jeremy Zilar of NYTimes.com

David Cohn of Spot.us

Google Reader is just our first foray into feed reader support. We’re planning to connect to Netvibes, Netnewswire, and any others that are in popular demand (let me know if you have any requests).

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.

As one who has had my hard-earned copy “lifted” by other publications, without attribution, I completely understand Rosen’s outrage and obsessive Googling to find more dirt on the Texas writer whose crime she reveals.

During my fun-filled year as a blogger for The Washington Post, I wrote about important neighborhood issues, like where the next dounut shop would open. Seriously, people ate this stuff up.

Soon after my column on a Fractured Prune franchise ran online and in the newspaper, I found a very similar article in a competing local paper.

“Humm…,” I thought, “That was fast, especially since I got the tip from one of our correspondents and there was no press release. And the quote is exactly the same as the one I had, but the business owner didn’t seem like the kind of guy to have stock answers so early in his game…”

So I called the Troy Parkins, one of the franchise owners, and asked him if they had talked with any other media. He said no, he had not talked with any other reporters. I poured over the copy in both articles again and kept thinking… is this or is this not plagiarism?

Read and see for yourself. (I would normally copy and paste an excerpt of the articles in block quotes here, but the full story is needed to make a judgment.)

My “Living in LoCo” version: Hot Donuts Are Coming! and Leesburg Today’s version: Fractured Prune Donuts Coming to Town

Mulling this over for a day, I decided to reach out to the competition. Our local editor made the call.

A day later I got a call on my home phone from “Mike,” who had put the other story together, apologizing but in backhanded way, as if he really didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong. I remember him saying something along the lines of… well I read your column and get ideas, but I went to their web site and got the information myself.

Except the Fractured Prune web site didn’t say anything about who owned the new franchise or where the locations would be at that time. (It did have the history of the name and the product.) And when I confronted Mike with the knowledge that he did not actually interview the person quoted, he just said “sorry” again and quickly rang off.

A simple link with attribution to my column would have made this whole issue moot.

Plagiarism is more inexcusable on the web because writers can credit sources with a link.

Bloggers created this new form with linking out, typically with credit, to other sites — supporting and encouraging people to go to that other site. This behavior is the exact opposite of “walled gardens” we all created in the late 90′s to keep readers within our sites (and unfortunately, this practice still persists in some places today).

On the web, there is value in creating an alternative to copying someone else’s work. When editors value link journalism and communicate to their reporters and writers that including links to their sources and giving credit where credit is due is as important as meeting a deadline, they will provide less incentive for plagiarism. This is the “ethic of the link.”

Consider this. Links also create more value around original content. So while there may be tens, if not hundreds, of blogs and sites referencing a big story, the links will all take them to the source — the reporter and publication that created the original content.

Clearly hyper local news about donut shops is the least of the world’s concerns. It is just an illustration that at every level, the lines of plagiarism and rewrite might be blurred. But do we journalists protest too much? Do readers care how a story came about, whether original or not?

You don’t even need to answer — just include the relevant source links and those questions become irrelevant.

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.)