Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

Link journalism

Posted on | April 1, 2008 | No Comments

A common blogging practice is becoming more popular as its own genre: link journalism.

It’s a form of communication to me that won’t supplant but will supplement more traditional forms of journalism. Drudge is the king of link journalism. In it, you wade hip-deep into all sorts of information you didn’t know existed before you started at Drudge or Instapundit or whatnot. (And now there’s networked linked journalism). Mainstream media is brain dead when it comes to even the simplest linking tactics. (Memo to newspaper Websites: Get over yourselves. Serve your readers.)

While good link journalism gives you micro-insights, it’s not a place for macro-insights, the kinds of epiphanies that drive business decisions. There’s more than enough information today; not enough time to digest it, and the problem is only getting worse.

The thing that will continue to drive good traditional journalism is synthesis and time—time to knowledge but, more importantly, time to insight. The faster the better.

Check out this perspective from ars technica, one of the better tech-reporting sites—has been for a long time. Author Timothy Lee posts in response to Eric Alterman’s piece in the New Yorker, which we commented on last week.

Time to insight is valuable; time to insight moves businesses; time to insight is sticky; time to insight can be advertised against.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Related posts:

  1. On writing becomes "on journalism"
  2. Defining journalism
  3. Good journalism=bad p.r.
  4. A Darwinian view of journalism: Bill Keller and adaptability
  5. Lemann’s "revenge" (?)

Category: Uncategorized

Comments

No Responses to “Link journalism”

  1. Lou Covey
    April 1st, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

    I can agree that online journalism is growing rapidly and needs to be considered as “real” journalism… whatever that means. But I looked at Techmeme’s list and saw that more than 25 percent of the publications on the list were part of “traditional” journalism. what’s more, more than 26 percent of the presence on the web is still in the realm of the traditionals.

    But here is something I think is REALLY interesting. Most tech companies rely on Business Wire and PR News Wire for their reach into the web and the two of them together don’t make up for more than 0.7 percent of presence on the web.

Leave a Reply





Theme Tweaker by Unreal
Switch to our mobile site