Jay Rosen, who you should follow on Twitter if you don’t already, lays an excellent foundation:

Ryan Sholin breaks down the argument for linking into five parts. Basically, journalists should be responsible citizens of the web. They have responsibility to their readers to provide as much information as they can bring together, responsibility to build bridges between the different parts of their online community, and responsibility to point readers in the direction of the right information when the journalists don’t immediately have the answer.

One point I touched on and want to reiterate is linking is a process of showing your work. This is fundamentally a Good Thing. Both Sean Sullivan and Paul Balcerak agree. In the age of newspapers, buggies, and clapboard houses, the reader was forced to make the assumption that the publication fact-checked and caught all of their errors. Hyperlinking text inherently means that the reader can then go and check out what you’re linking to. If you’re writing a piece with facts you want to substantiate, you can link to the source of every one of those facts. In fact, I agree that it’s “suspect for journos not to link whenever possible.” Making the reporting process transparent builds trust between the publication and the reader, and trust builds brand.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of traditionally print publications that haven’t caught wind of this. A few days back, NYU Local, the upstart publication at NYU, accused the Washington Square News of pilfering their posts without attribution. They found five examples of where NYU Local originally reported the story, only to have Washington Square News rewrite the story and pass it off as their own. If you read through the comments, you’ll notice these examples aren’t necessarily where NYU Local had the scoop, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a critical point Lily is making:

Over the weekend, your former editor and current contributing writer Sergio Hernandez posted about “The Embittered Feud Between NYU’s Junior Journalists” on his personal blog. The post itself was worth reading, but part of Sergio’s response to the onslaught of NYU Local contributor comments was even more interesting and on-point. We complained about your shoddy linking and he dismissed it, saying that we are completely different beasts, and that your online presence is a mere formality. Because your primary medium is print, perhaps for you the web essentially serves as another vehicle to display that print content. Sergio was right in some ways: your paper and our blog are completely different beasts, but the fact remains that your website and NYU Local are not. When you translate content to the web, you need to adjust it to coincide with online ethics. And one basic tenet of those ethics is linking. As young, informed internet users, we assume you know all of this already, so why haven’t you acted on it?

I suppose this is more an argument of “shoulds” than realities. Because, in reality, it is all too easy for you to say that WSN behaves like a traditional newspaper, free of links, and leave it at that. The thing is, you spent the summer re-vamping your website (for the second time in less than two years). Why bother making your site more attractive if you couldn’t care less about advancing the level of your online content?

Not only that, but the “ethic of the link” is actually a more powerful tool, method, and ethos for journalism than anything that came before.

It’s a big, wild internets out there with many examples to illustrate my point. I’d like to share a few:

• The Money Meltdown – Matt Thompson’s response to the beginning of the global economic crisis offers original curation to provide context and background to one of the largest stories of our lifetime. His blog about the future of context in news is also a recommended read.
• UC walkout: Headlines, tweets and links – Nate Miller and Laurel Rosenhall also approach telling a story through a mixture of context and real-time curating.
• “What We’re Reading” on The New York Times Bits Blog – Journalists do a significant amount of reading as a part of the reporting process. A Publish2 widget in the right sidebar allows them to leverage that work and provide value to their readers.

Ultimately, linking provides tremendous value to your readers because it allows you to highlight the most authoritative voices in a story. At Publish2, we build the tools, including the one I used to add links in this post, to make this happen.

On Tuesday, I was quite pleased to announce the first formal release of the Publish2 WordPress plugin. With the 1.1 version, journalists on Publish2 can easily add their link journalism to the sidebar of their blog, add a reading list much like I have on my own website, or have simple, intuitive access to their curated links at the point when they’re most likely to need them the most: when writing a story.

Ok, enough with the public relations speak. That last bit is what I’m really excited about. We’re calling it Link Assist, and I’m itching to write about some of the the philosophy driving it.

I digress to set the scene. Link Assist is a widget-y bit of functionality that lives in the sidebar of your edit post page within WordPress (where you’d actually write a post). Getting it set up is a simple process of dropping your link journalism URL (this is mine) into “Your Profile” under “Users” and hitting the checkbox for Link Assist. Once you’ve done this, Link Assist will load automatically and in the background every time you set up to write a new post.

This is where the magic happens.

Link Assist is all about making your own curated web more useful. When saving a link to Publish2 with comments and tags, you’re making an implicit judgement that the link holds value. The immediate return on your effort is that you share the link with your readers, either via Twitter, “What We’re Reading” embedded on your publication’s website, etc. What you’re doing when you’re curating the web, however, is also creating a repository of information whose value is in relationship to you. The comments and tags you assign to a link define this relationship. Link Assist is another step in making that very repository much more accessible. When you have that thought of “Oh, I remember reading such and such which would make a good link to the graf I’m writing at the moment,” the link you’re thinking of should be at your metaphorical fingertips, instead of lost in one of the 50 tabs you have open.

With this first release, there two distinct navigational features to make this happen. The first is that clicking on the tags associated with every link will then filter your links by that tag. Personally, I have a deliberate approach to tagging my links. My strategy is intended to both serve as information descriptive to the reader and give them a broad sense of what the link is about, but also to serve as a navigational tool for me when I need to find that link again.

As an example, I often tag links with the type of link, the location the link is relevant to, and/or broad yet descriptive keywords for what the link is about. I’m also a big fan of using proper nouns. It isn’t an exact science, but I try and mimic my tagging taxonomy across platforms (Publish2, WordPress, Gmail, etc.).

Ultimately, the work building this mental framework for how all of my links fit together pays large dividends. When presented with the right tools, I have a whole set of breadcrumbs I can follow to find the link I’m thinking of. Link Assist takes advantage of this to make navigation, or getting at what you need to find, much more intuitive.

Link Assist also includes a second unique, experimental approach to navigation — as long as you’re not on IE 6. You can use the entire right and left side columns as buttons, as well as arrows at the top, to go back and forth through your links.

There are a number of services out in the interwebs that will automatically populate your posts with links, images, and videos. Link Assist is geared towards those who have a prejudice against a machine and algorithm adding dubious value that is then passed off as their own. It’s the human touch that adds the most value.

Link Assist meets you where you need it and offers a powerful way to better curate the web.

Dotters-Katz and Papailiou’s proposal would add two justices to the existing five-member court and require it to submit rules changes to the Senate for approval. It would also re-establish the Elections Board as an independent entity to avoid conflicts of interest that Papailiou said were endemic under previous administrations.

There’s something wrong with this picture. I’m not talking about the proposed changes, rather it’s in the way that the information is presented. Reporting in the “traditional” news brief format, the reader (me) is left more confused than informed. There is almost zero context associated with the article, and I haven’t the faintest idea what the information presented actually means.

Such is the old paradigm. Newspapers are dead; long live newspapers. I’m of the opinion however that the new paradigm, the one that everyone’s afraid of, is actually improving journalism. Go figure.

For instance, if the Daily Emerald had the innovation, talent, and tools, I would have been presented an array of options to expand my knowledge about Dotters-Katz, how the ASUO runs, and why he proposes a change to the Constitution. There would likely be a list of previous posts on this issue, a small topical wiki in the sidebar synthesizing the pulse of ASUO, and curation of student blogosphere reactions to the announcement (like this one and one from the Oregon Commentator), among other forms of information.

Instead, the readers get nothing better than a press release and I have to use Google, coincidentally, to educate myself further. Google is taking the place of the news organization largely because the newspapers are flailing. Get with the times, please, and use the infinitely useful and flexible platform the internet gives you to empower your community with information.

Oh wait, the Daily Emerald runs College Publisher. Make sure your CMS is open source, and then innovate.