News sites loosen linking policies
News sites that once staunchly refused to link offsite, especially to competitor sites, are now testing the waters with offsite links in blogs and e-mail newsletters, Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser reports. Most interestingly, Nytimes.com told him of plans in the works for a "Web-only feature that will aggregate a number of quality news sources."
Adrian Holovaty, one of Glaser's interview subjects, posted his complete interview answers on his Weblog. At Holovaty's suggestion, CyberJournalist.net Publisher Jonathan Dube, who was also interviewed, has posted his complete answers here for those interested in reading them:
Jonathan Dube's response to Mark Glaser's questions about news sites' linking policies:
"I think how each Web site handles linking should vary from site to site depending on a site's mission.
"I do doubt that linking to outside news sites would hurt a news site's traffic numbers -- any effect likely would be negligible when you're talking about thousands or millions of users and research shows most only click on a few pages of a site during each visit before going elsewhere. For some sites, creating features that link to other sites might even help increase traffic -- a good example of this is Slate's Today's Papers, which offers readers a useful summary of newspaper front pages, with links, and has become one of the site's most popular features. Even though Today's Papers sends people elsewhere via links, people return because they find the feature gives them useful information.
"I think the key issue in deciding whether to link to other sites is not about traffic, but about what purpose it serves and how trustworthy the information is. As a news source that people turn to for reliable information, news sites should maintain the same editorial standards for anything they put online, whether original articles or links to outside sites -- doing so is essential for news sites to maintain their credibility, and thus their value, to users.
"In certain cases, such as the release of the space shuttle crash report, it makes sense to link to online documents -- it is clearly information that has value to the user. As a news gathering organization, it is more difficult to verify the reliability of information on a random Web site or even on another news site -- and if you decide it is worth your time to verify that information, then at that point you might as well write your own article."
Sep 17, 2003 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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