Originally posted at BeatBlogging.org, a resource for journalists using social networks, blogs, and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.
Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How and Why.
Well, conveniently enough, I work for [...]

If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained — or retrain themselves — as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization’s future on the web.
Steve observes:
On the Internet, we have [...]

My post on the Washington state linking project focused on the awesome innovation involved and on the benefits of collaborative linking in general. But the project also shows why this kind of news aggregation is so useful for a local audience.
The biggest danger with news aggregation is that instead of acting as a filter, it [...]

The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be.
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 [...]

So you’ve got a big breaking story right in your backyard, e.g. the governor gets arrested for trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the President Elect. Your newsroom is on the case, but the story is still developing. There are national ramifications, so reporting goes beyond the local angle. How do you [...]

There’s an article page on GoVolXtra, Knoxnews.com’s sports vertical site for the Tennessee Vols, that accounted for 6% of ALL Knoxnews and GoVolXtra article page views for the last two weeks, and as much as 14% of all article page views one of the days since it was first published. The page has consistently generated [...]

Reading Eagle has brought their journalists out from behind the curtain to share with readers what they are reading on the web — often beyond what can be found on Reading’s own site. Their new link journalism feature is called, appropriately enough, What We’re Reading:

Each editor has a profile on the page with photo, email, [...]

Most newsrooms have utterly narcissistic Twitter accounts. The worst offenders (which unfortunately is the majority) use services like Twitterfeed to automatically tweet links to the newspaper’s own content. Here’s our RSS feed on Twitter! Don’t get enough of our content on our site or through RSS? Now get it on Twitter, too!
Some newsrooms are slightly [...]

The New York Times published an article this week about mainstream news organizations embracing link journalism and news aggregation. Gawker and others scoffed that they are late to the game, which they are, but that misses (predictably) the BIG story.
If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds of newspaper sites start linking to [...]

There are several reasons why most mainstream news organizations have been slow to embrace link journalism.
First, news orgs typically act as though other news orgs don’t exist (blame long-standing notions of “owning” the news, and more recent unjustified fears of sending readers away). Second, news orgs had few mechanisms for breaking out of that walled-garden [...]

Will algorithms replace human editors on the web? It’s a bogeyman question on one level, but ask any news site about the percentage of traffic they get from search engines — and what the trend looks like — and you’ll realize that algorithms are increasingly deciding what we pay attention to, what is important, what [...]

washingtonpost.com has launched a new politics page called Political Browser, which features, wait for it… links to the most important and interesting political news around the web. That’s right, the Washington Post, one of the paragons of original political reporting, has dedicated a page to help you find the best of OTHER news organization’s political [...]

Yeah, fine, so Drudge gets lots of traffic for links, but we’re not Drudge, so it won’t work for our news site, right? Wrong. Here’s a case example from Knoxnews.com’s sports site GoVolsXtra.com.
This roundup of links to coverage and commentary on the Vols’ loss to Florida was the MOST VIEWED article today on GoVolsXtra.com.

You could [...]

The front page of the newspaper used to set the news agenda. Extra, Extra, read all about it! But that influence has steadily waned through the TV and Cable News era, and the web now threatens to obliterate it entirely.
So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence is a guy with nothing but [...]

Scott framed his previous challenge to news sites in general terms: like Drudge, any site could use continuously updated aggregation to become a “destination for links to news of what’s going in the world.” But this kind of aggregation can be just as powerful when applied to specific stories or topics.
For example, you might have [...]

Jay Rosen of PressThink has started a meme called “spinewatch,” which he’s pursuing on Twitter with the #spinewatch tag and on the Publish2 Spinewatch Newsgroup that he created, where he offers this description:
Spinewatch is a newsgroup and link bank for campaign 2008 stories of a certain narrowly-defined type. Here, we keep track of reporting from [...]

Responding to the investigation of plagiarism on the web by Jody Rosen at Slate, Publish2’s Editorial Director Tammi Marcoullier reflects on her own experience with being plagiarized while blogging for The Washington Post and wonders whether placing more value on link journalism could help with the problem of plagiarism among journalists. Check it out [...]

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:

Last month, four major newspaper companies announced a joint ad sales venture to “let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call.” When I read that, I realized suddenly why local newspapers are having so much trouble adapting to the web.
There’s no such thing as a local website.

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 [...]