No excuse not to link to news sources

When people want to know, especially when it comes to breaking news or severe weather, they want the info. They don’t care where they get it from as long as it’s a source they trust.

(via joeruiz.net)

A nice post from Joe Ruiz back in May 2009 about link journalism. He advocates linking directly to the article you’re referring to, rather than linking to your own site first, even though doing so gets your site more hits.

I agree that we should always, always give credit where its due and that we should never feel bad about retweeting or crediting a competitor. After all, we’re in the business of spreading news; it doesn’t matter where the news comes from.

I do, however, support the idea of occasionally linking first to your own site’s coverage of a story. Granted, we don’t want people to think they’ve been given a small-time rickroll, but for big local stories, I think it’s OK to drive traffic directly to your organization’s site.

That said, if all your site’s doing is rereporting what someone else has said, like in Ruiz’s example, then we should probably just be linking to the original and following up with our own reporting if the story warrants it.

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