July 25, 2007 at 6:09 pm
The Missing Links
If you read news on the web, you’ve no doubt noticed that newspapers appear to be split on the subject of embedding external web links in their stories. Some newspapers do it, most don’t.
I suspect that some folks have decided they don’t want to do it, for whatever reason, but I think it’s mainly a question of resources — adding links into stories is really an editorial job. Each link requires some subtle editorial decision-making, and it doesn’t really make sense for web production or marketing staffpeople to do this stuff. You need a web-savvy writer and a web-savvy editor who are invested in making it happen. And I know at struggling alts. it can be difficult to justify spending much editorial time on the web.
But I think it’s worth doing.
Embedding external links allows interested readers to drill down into content if they want. That’s important at newspaper sites. We’re in the information business, so we want to offer as much of it as we can (within reason). Linking also increases web awareness, which in the long-run should increase the quality of web resources available. Think about it — if local businesses and institutions see that people are really using and paying attention to their sites, they may devote more resources to maintaining them (and might think more about advertising online). Links also help improve search engine optimization — yours and theirs.
It’s only been a few months since we started regularly embedding links in our stories at Seven Days — here’s an example of what I mean.
We’re still refining the process, and our linking guidelines. The way it works now, the writers send me (the online editor) the links for their stories each week. On Wednesday morning, after the web production staff uploads the week’s content to our content management system, I log in and manually input the links. This can be a tedious process, especially if the writers (many of them self-proclaimed Luddites) forget to send me their links. Then I have to go out and find them myself. On an average week, it takes me a couple hours to add links to all of our stories and columns.
I think that in an ideal world, we’d all be writing on a web-based system, and the writers would embed the links as they go, and the regular editors (not the “online editor”) would edit them the way they do the rest of the story. But we’re not there yet.
Tags: community, conversation, newspaper, process, workflow
Roxanne Cooper:
July 20, 2007 at 8:34 am
And links out tend to beget links back in. That was my experience while blogging, anyway.
Larry Banner:
August 2, 2007 at 8:54 am
I agree: Links in articles (both external AND internal) are very important. I consider such linking to be an essential element in successful online journalism. Though a little tedious, t’s not too much work at all, especially in the world of quick-googling. We have three editorial linking goals in any piece we post online.
1- Links to official sites, especially government, non-profit, or other organizations referenced as key elements within a story.
2 – Links to primary source documents, PDFs, reports, databases, online articles or even videos that are key references and sources within a story.
3 – Very important! Links to our own past (and archived) coverage of a story. We have a wealth of reporting value on issues and stories of interest and concern to our community. Linking related stories and continued coverage of our own work keeps the information out there and continues to raise awareness of our reporting value.
We do the work of linking in a number of ways: As the new media guy for our alt-weeklies, I make a point of reading and searching out links of relevance for our online articles. Our editors do the same as articles come across their desks and they direct the individuals responsible for online editorial upload on links.
But mainly our goal, and we have had success here, is to train our writers to keep track of links for online references, resources, etc. and submit these along with their stories. In this changing media world, skill in this task as a journalist is essential.