Linking is the key to reinventing online news, reports Publishing 2.0. While newsrooms try to cover all the resource bases, online reporting shouldn't attempt to, the website suggests. Instead, online news should provide original reporting with the support of links to additonal original reporting on the same subject.

The article sets up an analogy to demonstrate the projected importance of linking to online reporting: the reported quote is to print journalism as the link will be to online news.



Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review offers helpful tips for effective hyperlinking and suggests that online journalists owe it to readers to provide useful links that relate to the story.

"Ultimately, the addition of useful hyperlinking within an online news story reflects the strong reporting of its author. If a reporter does not know of online pages with extra information relating to the story, he or she cannot link to them. But if you have that information, why not share it with those readers who are eager for it?" he said.

Some critics fear linking will turn away readers. The logic proves faulty when one considers the huge success of Google, whose primary purpose is to provide links to other websites. Users aren't turned away, and in fact have been coming back in droves.

Linking, Publishing 2.0 argues, has the ability to not only enrich stories with additional sources but also tell stories themselves. The article displays linking's storytelling capacity as well as other innovative examples of hyperlinking.

Source: Publishing 2.0 (illustrations too)