We’re rolling out Publish2 News Exchange to existing Publish2 users this week and, as always, journalists can register for free accounts.

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.

Designing a News Startup From Scratch in 60 Minutes

The goal would be to rapidly prototype what a news organization of the future might look like by walking the hypothetical startup from concept to a year after launch and covering things such as:

• Identifying the community
• Speculating on the ideal number and composition of staff
• Brainstorming the technology behind the website, and what sort of functionality the news organization would offer
• Proposing revenue models
• Designing the newsroom (the balance between working virtually and in physical space)
• Listing out all of the information your community might need, and the resources required to cover it (this could even be a session on its own)

This would be a very proactive activity for those in newsrooms currently, and might even bootstrap a few projects from people in the room.

J School in 2020

In regards to journalism education, much of the discussion has been focused on whether or not J schools are adequately preparing their students for the reality of the newspaper industry and, from this, how they might change their curriculum incrementally to address the needs of today. This isn’t good enough. Instead of playing catchup, as the New York Time states the obvious, I think it would be far more powerful to apply the concept of scenario planning to the future of journalism education, and the university system as well. The education industry should be learning from the newspaper industry.

From my view, there are three roles of the university in the 21st century. One, provide the basic foundation in any subject matter for a person to be able to then grow from. In journalism, this might be ethics, media, etc. I wouldn’t teach any tools in these core classes, but the classes would be evening supplements to internships and work experience. Two, teach how to learn. In a world changing at an exponential pace, the ability to quickly understand and act upon information is paramount. The kicker to approaching this in the university setting? The subject material would be completely random and change from term to term. Three, be a sandbox. Be the place where people of any age can go to learn more about the world and their role within it. Let them experiment and play with reality, but let the university be the place where learners can experiment and fail gracefully. The university system almost does the first of these three at the moment. That’s not good enough.

Discussion in this session would lead to actionable takeaways. If I were the Dean of a J school right now, these are several of the things I would consider doing:

• Start blogging more regularly about how the J school is changing and what your vision for it. As the leader of any organization, facilitating vision is critical. Blogging makes it open, two-way, and more approachable. Create different scenarios for journalism in 2020, and discuss how the J school will support that.
• Launch a series of skills-based evening or weekend classes (i.e. Flash, editing audio, etc.) that are open to anyone. Make them free. Create demand for your product.
• Make regular blogging (and maybe tweeting) a requirement of anyone in the journalism school. I’m personally trying to blog more often because I know writing regularly will improve my abilities. Same concept applies. Have an online space that aggregates these blog posts by topic. Propose blog topics over the list serv, have students write on them, and then have a forum to continue the discussion in person.
• Establish a startup seed fund. A lot of good journalists aren’t going to be getting newspaper jobs after they graduate this year. They’ll think a lot higher of the university if it funds innovation and competition.

I’m also planning on bringing audio and video recording equipment. Hopefully not a moment of this weekend will go uncaptured. Also, if anyone is down for a run around Philly on Sunday morning, ping me up.

The future of news isn’t newspapers. The newspaper is an inefficient, uneconomic, and environmentally-troubling method of moving data. In my opinion, Steve Rhodes laid out an epic laundry list of everything that’s broken in the newspaper industry a few days ago. There isn’t any need to repeat that, thanks to the internet. The key takeaway is that, instead of trying to figure out how to financially support newspaper-style journalism on the web, we should be active in conversation about what journalism is, and how the internet will enable us to do it better.

To me, journalism is the act of providing impartial, accurate information to empower a community to make decisions. I had “independent” in the definition earlier, but I don’t believe that independence is entirely necessary if you partake in the art of full disclosure. The process of journalism need not be limited to newspapers, and the format need not be tied to an article measured in column inches. As Suzanne Yada rightfully noted just over a month ago, “Twitter isn’t journalism, just like television isn’t journalism, but you can find journalism ON Twitter and ON television.” Our information needs have changed from a hundred years ago, and the internet lends news organizations greater ability to fulfill this responsibility.

Two premises for the near future (that you’re welcome to dispute):

• Newspaper journalism operated in the era of information scarcity, where “what is news” was determined by the amount of space available in the delivery mechanism. Online journalism operates in the era of information as a commodity. This means that “what is news” is defined by the quality of information.
• We’re also now in an indefinite era of format fragmentation, meaning that journalism can be implemented in a myriad of different ways. This is another paradigm shift from the newspaper age, but not for the worse: the internet allows us to do more with information. The internet is ultimately a more powerful platform for journalism because users can be exposed to information automatically based on context and the depth of information they need.

The “Future of News” is going to be a competition to see who can create the most innovative and engaging ways to deliver information which empowers communities to make decisions.

Actually, I have three reasons I outlined earlier today for Publish2′s December contest. They originally were born of an ad-hoc Qik livestream, but I felt I didn’t communicate myself as well as I had hoped. It drove me to explain myself further. I think there are three important components to the future of journalism:

First: innovation. Those who come before me were fortunate or unfortunate (depending on how you look at it) in that they were stuck with limited tools with which to be a journalist. Today, we’ve got a growing arsenal of technology to tell the important stories with, let it be livestreaming on Qik, microblogging with Twitter, or practicing link journalism with Facebook. Contrary to the popular paradigm that we’ll settle on one format, this is just the beginning of tool fragmentation. By playing and experimenting with the tools, I position myself to take advantage of what they offer.

Second: the untold stories. Using a combination of emerging tools and traditional formats, my goal is to cover the under reported, most troubling issues we face as a globally connected society. Examples include water access exploitation in India, deforestation and the climate in Haiti, and homelessness in the big cities of Latin America. Being a journalist of the future means using the tools to expand your capacity to tell the word’s most important stories.

Third: collaboration. I began this fall as the Online Editor for the Oregon Daily Emerald wanting to push the publication to innovate with technology. Given the limited resources at hand, I realised that the only way I could achieve anything significant would be to work collaboratively with my peers across the nation. From that vision, CoPress was formed. Contributing to the network is an increasingly successful method of innovation.

As much as I’m a futurist, I still think the core philosophies of journalism still play a significant role in how information is distributed across the net. The two continuing discussions will be what format news will take, let it be 140 characters, wiki article, or blog post, and how to monetize the abstract value it provides.