Dan Gillmor: News sites must link to other sources

Posted by Ben Thalman on June 14, 2007 at 1:32 PM

“Journalists and traditional news organizations need to recognise that they don’t know everything,” said Dan Gillmor, a citizen journalism “guru”, speaking at the New Media Knowledge conference in London on Wednesday; the point made by Gillmor being that news sites have to become comfortable with sending their readers to other sources.

Gillmor went on to point out that this is a tenable position for a competitive news website because, he argues: “If you send people away they come back to you because if you are sending them away to the good stuff they will trust you even more.”

The problem is that there is so much information available on the Internet, some good some bad. In addition, news companies simply cannot be experts on every topic and have all the information. The solution to these problems is for news companies to point readers to the right resources, the resources that offer accurate information. News companies must sort out reputable sources and link to them.

It is news companies’ reputation that will continue to be their absolute advantage, the advantage that will grow in importance. People will return to these news sites because they know that, because of their reputation, these sites can be trusted to give them complete, accurate information and will not hesitate to send users to helpful sources.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

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