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.

Mark Potts makes a strong argument for why newspapers shouldn’t give up on the paid content model, but it belies the principal reason why they should:

But the delight about the end of TimesSelect is misplaced. While the “content needs to be free” crowd hails it as a victory, the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed. Simply put, the Times put the wrong content behind its $49.95 pay wall. Columnists and opinion? At a time when the blogosphere is all about debating the very issues those columnists wrote about? Cutting Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd et al out of the conversation just wasn’t very smart. And the syndication of those columnists made the Times’ decision to restrict access even more ridiculous—the only place you couldn’t get them for free was the Times site itself. Oops!

TimesSelect could have been so much more. It could have been a high-end subscription service for in-depth coverage that wasn’t otherwise available, for supplemental reporting and blogs and Web-only content in specific vertical topics that would have been valuable to the Times’ core audience, and worth 50 bucks a year. As it was, the Times’ decision to include almost unlimited access to its archives in TimesSelect was a smart move all by itself. Surely a broader, deeper for-pay product could have been built around that core. Alas, we may never know.

Mark is right that cutting off Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd from the conversation didn’t make sense, but cutting off “in-depth coverage” and “supplemental reporting” from the web’s link ecosystem doesn’t make sense either.

When the New York Times publishes unique, high-quality content, and when that content is free and open, it typically gets many links from blogs and other sites that refer traffic via those links. So, being free, that content reaches beyond the more limited TimesSelect audience, not only to regular readers of the Times who weren’t TimesSelect subscribers, but also to a broader audiences that reads the Times “opportunistically,” i.e. only when referred.

Which gets to the other key benefit, which overshadows these traffic referrals in the short-term — search.

When Times content is free and open and LINKED, it gets A LOT of search traffic. But not just in the short-term — search is FOREVER — or rather as long as that content continues to rank for keywords with any search volume, which in many cases is a gift that keeps on giving.

Newspapers — and all original content producers — need to think about the “lifetime value” of their content when monetized through fees vs. when monetized through advertising. Only a finite number of paid subscribers will ever realize the value of content at the time it is published and in the archive. But through search, the potential audience for that content, to be monetized through advertising, is many (MANY) times greater.

The New York Times understands this, which contributed to the decision to tear down the pay. This is from the NYT press release:

Since TimesSelect was launched in 2005, changes in the way people find news and opinion on the Web have altered the online landscape. Because of online users’ growing reliance on search in order to navigate the Web, NYTimes.com expects to see a substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site once the pay wall is gone. Due to this anticipated growth in traffic, the TimesSelect subscription revenue model will be replaced by one that is based on advertising.

“TimesSelect brought new commentary and voices to the site, as well as an influx of subscription revenue. But the increasing dominance of search and other forms of referral have changed the equation. Allowing unfettered, free access to our opinion content and recent archives should enable us to drive readership and advertising.”

Here’s NYT CEO Janet Robinson from her presentation at the Newspaper Association of America 2007 Mid-Year Review:

Currently the Times Company is the 11th largest audience aggregator on the Web, with 43.8 million visitors in May, up 11 percent from May of 2006. We expect to grow this audience through continued application of search engine optimization to expose our world-class content to search engines and other forms of Internet distribution, as well as new products.

The TimesSelect experiment notwithstanding, the New York Times is one of the savviest newspapers — and one of the savviest content sites generally — when it comes to realizing the value of premium content by opening it up to the web’s link-based economy. They have come to the realization that the web has fundamentally changed the economics of content.

Other newspapers and content producers would be wise to follow their lead.

Mark Glaser of Media Shift got into a debate with Nick Carr of Rough Type over the current state of employment at traditional media companies and news organization — and the impact of news organizations’ new focus on digital media. In the face of continuing editorial staff layoffs, Mark saw a silver lining in the increased hiring to support growing digital media businesses. Nick doesn’t see sufficient evidence to support the optimism, and thinks the number of journalism jobs is still shrinking overall.

But this debate largely misses — and is ultimately the more pressing issues — is what type of skills journalists need to survive the digital transition and thrive in a digital media world.

In a response to Nick, Mark does point out:

I also believe the traditional jobs of reporters, editors and photographers are changing. A person who used to do reporting by calling up some sources, rewriting a press release and filing it to a news desk for the print edition will likely be doing their job differently in the future. That person might write a blog, report stories, moderate a community of interested readers/participants, and edit the submissions of citizen journalists. Ditto for editors and photographers who will likely work with more part-time, freelance and citizen media contributors than full time staffers.

In Mark’s original post, Laurel Touby of mediabistro.com observes:

While many traditional media companies believe they’ll save money by pushing out tenured staff in favor of tech-savvier newbies, Touby thinks that’s a wrong-headed notion. She said media companies are pushing out talented people who could easily have been re-trained, and that training new hires can be just as time-consuming and costly. mediabistro.com offers classes for journalists to get digital training, and the site is reaching out to media companies to help re-train people, but is facing resistance.

“It’s a hard sell because media companies have traditionally not invested in people, they don’t invest in management training programs, they don’t invest in any kind of training of people,” Touby said. “It’s a talent industry, so it’s like ‘if you’re not good enough when you get here, you’re out!’ You swim or die, and they don’t treat their people that well. They don’t invest in human capital.”

One of Publish2’s principal ambitions is to help bridge this gap, to help journalists — and through them the practice of journalism — develop robust digital media skills, to make them truly web-savvy. By “web-savvy” I mean able to leverage the web as the ultimate networked news and information medium, where everything and everyone is connected, and all publishing is dynamic.

The best way to become the type of web-savvy journalist who will help news organizations through the digital transition is to actually USE the web. Nothing has taught me more about the dynamics of the web than publishing the Publishing 2.0 blog. To understand the Web, so that they can drive the transformation of journalism and news on the Web, journalists need to get their “hands dirty,” to learn how they can make the Web work for them, for journalism, and for their news organizations.

As a journalist, here’s what Publish2 helps you do with the Web:

• Manage your professional identity as a journalist on the Web with a social networking profile designed for journalists — and designed to be the top search result for your name
• Help sources and readers find you by showcasing your best clips and recent articles, indexed by topic, and by highlighting the topics you’re currently reporting on
• Connect with other journalists reporting on the same topic (in a non-competitive context) to share sources, references, background, and tips
• Increase your productivity with Web-based bookmarks and notes — access them from any computer, organize them by topic or assignment, search them
• Share with readers what you’re reading and help them filter the Web
• Collaborate with other journalists in creating the most powerful news filter on the Web
• Help your news organizations serve their readers better by leveraging content from across the Web

Jeff Jarvis pointed to Neil McIntosh’s exhortation to journalism students that deep, hands on Web experience is an absolute requirement for anyone serious about a career in journalism:

Again, for those at the back: if you think you want to be a journalist, I now don’t think there’s any excuse not to have a blog. The closer you get to looking around for jobs, the better it should be maintained. If you enter the jobs market without one, no matter how good your degree, you’re increasingly likely to lose out to people who better present all they can do, and have the experience of creating and curating their own site.

Journalists can no longer be many steps removed from the means of production and distribution — this type of hands on Web experience needs to become part of what defines a journalist’s skill set. While I still maintain that every journalist should start a blog, creating another outlet for original content creation is still a high bar.

That’s why we designed Publish2 to integrate with journalists’ existing workflow, to help them be more productive and ultimately more web-savvy in the reporting that they do for their news organizations.

And, we designed Publish2 to help journalists connect on the Web. Many journalists have been looking to social networks like Facebook as a way to leverage the web. There are already 500+ groups on Facebook for journalists — but unlike a one-size-fits-all application like Facebook, which are designed for personal networking, Publish2 is design to for professional networking — and for journalists specifically.

This fits with a larger trend — the emergence of professional social networks tailored to the needs of specific group of professionals, as highlighted in the Wall Street Journal today:

Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook Inc., is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.

Social software design guru Josh Porter of Bokardo adds:

My hunch is that we’ll see a lot more specialized social networks coming soon. They’ll support a unique activity and user group in ways that generic software can’t, as well as provide the appropriate privacy and membership tools to keep them high quality and relevant.

Update: Several folks have pushed back on the idea that these sites are anything new…or anything beyond the forums of the 90s. The difference is that they are now social web applications, offering tools to rate, review, track, and otherwise record various parts of activities that we didn’t have before. Another big difference is that some are person-centric as opposed to topic-centric (as in forums), so different relationships are formed, you can make connections, friend someone, follow someone, etc. All of these services are different, however, but I do believe there is a general trend…

That’s why we are building Publish2 around a suite of tools and a professional profile that help journalists connect on the web around their professional work, i.e. their reporting — to share ideas and resources, and to collaborate on filtering the sea of news and information on the Web.

Of course, when Publish2 opens in Beta next month, we’re going to be going through an intensive learning process of our own. If you’re interested in learning together, please sign up for the Beta.