Comments on: Why we link: #J361 presentation on curation

By: What Is the Ethic of the Link? « Reporting 1 Blog

What Is the Ethic of the Link? « Reporting 1 Blog — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:23:21 +0000

[...] follow Daniel Bachhuber, whose “ethic of the link” presentation to the fall #J361 is here. (Comment on that post, thoughtfully and with links? Extra credit on next week’s current [...]

By: Daniel Bachhuber

Daniel Bachhuber — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:40:17 +0000

Good points Sean, although I think the question of what you link to is more related to editorial judgement. Just as you decide what story to convey by cutting or emphasizing different parts of a story, I think it's important to curate how the story fits into the larger context of information on the web by the things you choose to link to vs. those you choose not to. If a press release has valuable information, or someone caught a story on Twitter before anyone else, then I think those are both worthy recipients of a link. An interesting related question, however, is whether the news organization should be responsible for vetting the information they're linking to (because linking, in some situations, implies endorsement).

By: S.P. Sullivan

S.P. Sullivan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:21:16 +0000

I think this is a really, really interesting ethics question. Coming from the perspective of an Old Media org trying to have an effective Web presence, the link issue is more of a logistics problem than an ethical one. I don't think anyone on my staff would disagree with the ethic of the link. But even with leadership that has pretty strong New Media sensibility, it's been challenging to retool our workflow so that the Web versions of stories aren't just chunks of text dumped into a Wordpress post. In one hilariously tragic [tragically hilarious?] instance, a new reporter did a story on a Web-based application built by the local computer science department, and failed to provide the URL to the application in the copy. None of the editors caught it, and the print story about this really cool tool failed to tell the reader the most important part: Where to find it. This is the challenge of teaching Old Media new tricks. Of course, I'm a big believer that poorly-done journalism, even with good intentions, is unethical. So maybe it's a logistical and ethical problem. But what, exactly, should you link? Should you link the press release? Do you h/t a tipster? I have my own opinions, but I'd like to hear more dialogue, because I don't think anyone disagrees over whether you should link, but over what you should link.