2012年11月8日 星期四

An Introduction to Link Journalism

Taking up the hyperlink philosophy of the Web to an unexpected extent, news organizations are gradually becoming comfortable linking to competitors, acting to all intents and purposes like aggregators. Link journalism is built on the implicit concession that humans cannot cope with the immense amount of information that is available on the Web and moreover they cannot search manually billions of Web pages for the information they look for. This new form of journalism links to other reporting on the Web to improve, complement, source or enrich a journalists original story.

Journalists can use the advanced technology and the free web tools of Publishing 2.0 platform to complement their stories with links of appropriate and appealing content. The technology of Publishing 2.0 enables the direct addition of links in the form of widgets, sidebars, or any other form. Besides, journalists can save and organize their links to their Web content, collaborate with other, non-affiliated journalists on a story, and publish links on their news sites, which they can later share on social networking websites.

More important than the technology used in link journalism are the reasons that news organizations increasingly embrace the Web culture and decide on tying the Web together. The value of link journalism lies in the fact that journalists use their single voice to filtering the Web because they have realized the editorial influence of the link.

A huge part of the journalists job is to filter all the information that is associated to their community and hand over the significant parts to their readers. By using link journalism, journalists can distribute the best links related to their stories and, in return, they are treated by their readers as first-class citizens by enjoying repeated visits to their news sites. In effect, their websites become a point of connection where their readers can find any sort of interesting streams.

The development of blogging has increased the use of links and hyperlinks for the promotion of journalistic and writing content as well as the revenues from contextual advertising such as Google AdSense. Readers who are consistently sent to media websites for good quality content return to read more. This builds consistent traffic to websites and although it took quite sometime for journalists to realize this, they found their way to link journalism. Today, linking out is a regular feature of the majority of news websites.

Besides, with link journalism, journalists can establish direct connections with their local online community. Posting links about local businesses, firms, organizations, and government institutions is the least of effort required by journalists to participate in the local online community and connect with their readers. The more a journalist digs into a story to link it to relevant content created by people on his/her story, the more the possibility for a big upside to link to community members.

Another important consideration for using link journalism is that news organizations are not anymore the monopolistic source of information they used to be. In such frantic times, readers look for instant information that can be offered from resourceful news channels locally, nationally, and globally. Over time, readers become more sophisticated and demanding and although they know that news organizations dont know everything, they know that they have many alternative options to search for the information they look for. Journalists can filter the information, check the sources, and link the most reliable information to their websites so as to disseminate the best available information to their readers. Considering the vast amount of information available on the Web, this is only feasible with link journalism.

Yet, journalists do not make the most of link journalism as websites still do not offer full integration of their links into their work processes. One way to solve this issue is if journalists save their links and editors publish them. However, this is also debatable for numerous reasons.

First, many journalists do not save links as part of their routine work practices, mainly because it is time consuming. Secondly, many journalists do not want to share their links on the Web, particularly if they are working on a confidential story. Thirdly, many journalists consider that saving links its not journalism at all.

Most people respect the attempts of journalists to bring reliable information to the world and make sense of it. Journalists add value to society in any form they use, print or online journalism. However, by making the most of link journalism they provide a way to readers to access the most interesting and significant information available on a regular basis. Besides, link journalism offers the advantage of higher search rankings on the Web.

Conclusively, link journalism is a powerful tool that makes the life of journalists a lot easier. Through a two-way interaction with their readers, journalists get ideas about what link they should post next and practically they save time on brainstorming. Besides, by being constantly present in the local link economy, they make it easier for their readers to become their sources and get the answers for them, thus saving them work. By linking their readers to the best information available on the Web, journalists keep them returning for more, drawing more traffic to their websites and ultimately, making more money.





iAutoblog the premier autoblogger software

沒有留言:

張貼留言