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Chain gangs

The breaking news is that the regular online news model is finally breaking up. For the first time since traditional media went online headline-hawkers are linking to their competitors.  

For example, two months before the US presidential election The Washington Post introduced a political website that recommended rival sites. Meanwhile, The New York Times will soon offer its online readers an alternative home page with links to competitors in various fields. And Tina Brown’s high-profile new online newspaper The Daily Beast makes a virtue of the fact it showcases articles from the best publications daily and promotes more than 30 rival websites — a mixture of professional content and blogs.  

Welcome to link journalism, a trend gaining momentum in other US newsrooms and a fundamentally different mindset for journalists, according to Scott Karp, chief of the web-based newswire Publish2, who coined the term (although surely hyper journalism sounds much better). 

For years, newspapers, magazines and TV station websites would not hyperlink to rivals because they wanted to keep the users on their own sites. More internal page views and longer time-spent-viewing should mean larger ad revenue for websites, right? 

Wrong: Karp asserts that news organisations have finally twigged that this logic is torpedoed by Google, which earns multiple, albeit fleeting, visits. US broadcaster NBC is now introducing sites for its local TV stations with links to local newspapers, radio stations, online videos and other sources.  

Significantly, the sites don’t even distinguish between the articles written by their own staff members and the links to outside sites.  

The New York Times’ alternative front page “will contain links to other news sites and blogs alongside the articles we publish,” The Times’ chief technology officer, Marc Frons, told web readers in July. That feature, called Times Extra, will be published using a technology called Blogrunner that The Times acquired in 2005. 

The Washington Post’s Political Browser, billed as a source of “what’s good on the web” freely links to competitors with features such as Required Reading, which sums up articles in newspapers and magazines. It even has Staff Picks, a list of articles that Washington Post employees had admired elsewhere. 

There’s a new counter-trend for anyone exhausted by hyper-journalism — particularly those journalists that feel their years of hard work are being eroded by the amateur blogger. It’s called the Return to Slow Journalism. Ex-Newsweek writer Stryker McGuire has set up International Quarterly, a publication that regularly features 10,000-word essays and will pay a premium to ensure it secures the services of only the very best writers.