Kurt Greenbaum is director of social media for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He can be reached at kgreenbaum@post-dispatch.com.
Sending readers away will keep them coming back for more
THE MOST-VIEWED STORY ON Jack Lail's Web site last year wasn't a story. And it wasn't news he or anyone in his newsroom produced.
No, the biggest story on KnoxNews.com was a list of updated, outbound links to blogs and other media sites, chronicling the drama between the departure of Tennessee Volunteers' football coach Phillip Fulmer and the hiring of his replacement, Lane Kiffin.
In the year-end tally, that single item drew 315,000 page views in one month. “Sports works good because a lot of people are interested, and a lot of people are writing about it,” said Lail, director of news innovation for The Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel.
Lail might be called a pioneer among newspaper journalists in “link journalism,” the practice of finding the good stuff on the Web and linking readers to it — whether it's on our own sites or not. He's been doing it for years, first manually copying and pasting links into his content management system and later using more sophisticated tools to streamline the process.
Whenever I bring up the idea among news folk, I'm always asked this question: We spend effort drawing readers to our Web sites; why turn around and send them away — perhaps to competitors?
Scott Karp has an answer: Because it makes us more valuable to our readers. And he points to one enterprise that's managed to eke out a business by sending readers away from its site — Google.
“One enduring asset of journalism is the trust factor,” said Karp, who is so in love with link journalism he founded a company around it: Publish2.com. News organizations should be able to leverage that by helping curate the information found in blogs and other media for their own readers, he says.
Karp's company builds tools for journalists — and, for now, only journalists — that make it easy to aggregate, organize and republish links.
So when torrential rains in western Washington breached levees, flooded roads and forced evacuations in January, journalists in four rival newsrooms used Publish2's collaborative tools to share links for their readers to vital information about the disaster. The Wenatchee World, The (Everett) Herald, Kitsap Sun and Sound Publishing's pnwlocalnews.com all worked together.
“Rather than wait for the AP to move updates, a network of journalists shared links to original reporting as we produced it,” said Elaine Helm, new media editor at The Herald. “That provided our readers deeper information at a faster pace than ever before.”
In my own newsroom, we're using link journalism to enhance our coverage of politics, religion, open government issues and the employment world. When a new women's soccer team began in our community, several of our editors began supplementing our soccer coverage by aggregating links to other stories and blog items.
When former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested late last year, we built a page of links to what the blogosphere and other news outlets were reporting. That page quickly rose to the top 10 for a brief period after the news broke.
“Curate” is the word that comes up a lot in this context. We're not linking willy-nilly to anything that's on the Web. We're trying to find the stuff that's interesting, insightful and different, information our readers will appreciate. Plenty of rivals for our readers' attention already get that. Chief among them: The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.
“Link journalism is critical to building our own credibility and to establishing that trust relationship with the reader,” said David Stoeffler, former editor and owner of Touchstone News Consulting. “I want to be the most comprehensive source and by linking to other reports, I'm putting my readers first — and my business second. I think that will pay off in the long run, but not all publishers will agree.”
So how should you do it?
Publish2 is one tool. But there are others. For example, using a customized Google search and a good RSS reader, any journalist can keep up with what the Web is saying about a news story you're following. With Google Reader, the links you choose could be shared, and an RSS feed of shared links can be fed to any Web page you choose.
Delicious.com is a social bookmarking site where members identify and tag links they find. If you're a member, you can aggregate your links with a common tag and, again, using an RSS feed, those links can be fed to any other Web page.
Even Twitter can be a tool for aggregating links. It's a common way people share news online within their community, their group of followers. Suppose several people were tweeting about the links they find — say, about a breaking news story in the community. Using the tools available at search.twitter.com, again, an RSS feed could aggregate the links and feed them to another Web page.
Beyond sports and breaking news, Lail suggests using it for softer news. In a special section about green living, for example, readers could benefit by pointing to the best stuff that's already out there.
“You can lay in another level of value to the reader,” he said. *