George Rebane
‘Link Journalism’ is fast sweeping the internet, and yet its meaning remains hazy to some. The intent of sites like Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics that practice link journalism is to provide links from their originating site to other sites that contain the material in its originally published form. Providing such content connectivity makes the originating site more valuable to its readers and increases traffic to it.
However, some websites are unclear on the concept and provide no such links. Instead, they attempt to provide a content-rich experience to the reader by doing things such as creating a collection of blogs that are resident on their own site, but can be filled by bloggers who are satisfied to be ‘captive bloggers’. No one gets to leave the original site’s pages.
Some sites are even so paranoid that they don’t allow links to other sites in the posts or comments that they invite on their sites. Such policies declare loudly that they are afraid that their reader, once they visit the linked site, will not come back to them – that the other site will ‘steal’ their readership. This, of course, is clear testimony that they know their content is not competitive, and that they can only retain readers if they trap their readers in a ‘dead end’ site, only one way in and the same way out.
A half-way step, that some sites scared of losing visitors practice, is to provide a link in their material that executes a retrieval program to go and fetch content from another site and then display it on the originating site. In short, ‘don’t bother to go there, we’ll get the stuff you want and you can read it right here’. This again is a self-defeating practice since such sites presume to know everything you want, which they don’t and couldn’t deliver even if they did.
Link journalism can be practiced in at least two ways – more ways are undoubtedly yet to be discovered – one is for the originating site to put links directly into the content (sometimes known as the site’s ‘payload’, the stuff the reader goes there for), and the other is to link from the site’s structural display elements (sometimes known as the ‘wrapper’) such as banners, side lists, tabs, pop-up windows, etc.
The bottom line is to use link journalism to create a huge web of inter-connected information that truly allows the visitor to surf far and wide on the internet. The better selected such links are on the originating site, the more valuable it is to the reader who will make sure that it is on the ‘favorites list’ of his/her browser.
Most of the local bloggers, who are not even ‘journalists’, attempt to practice link journalism by embedding such links into their payloads, and most certainly by maintaining a permanent list of selected links on the wrapper parts of their web pages.
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