The Linking Debate, Matt White

Linking is one of the most frequently used tools in online journalism. And it should be. Linking provides users with quick, easy access to anything the writer feels adds to the subject at hand. This advance in technology has provided journalists with a whole new dimension in the reporting world. Being able to give people instant access to endless resources related to your writing is something journalists of the past couldn't even fathom. Although this is such a pertinent tool in the online world, there is still the debate over when and where to use a link. In keeping with the theme of journalism, the following will provide a balanced look at both sides of the argument.

On one side of the debate, there is the feeling that everything that can be linked, should be. For example, if you're writing about Google, Twitter, or Facebook, you should link to each of these sites. Where this comes into play in the journalism field, is for example, if an article is about NASA, then there should be a link to NASA's homepage. If an article is about the West Edmonton Mall, you should link to its homepage. Basically, you should provide links to anything and everything that can be linked. The theory being if the writing is good enough, the reader will come back, no matter where you send them.

On the other side of the debate we have those who feel the reader won't come back no matter where you send them. There is the feeling that users have such a small attention span, once they venture out into the online world, they're not likely to return to the original article. So the solution becomes to only link to the most important and valuable websites. Link to websites that not only add valuable information to the story, but also requires little to no effort on the user's part in finding the information they're looking for.

For more information on linking, there are tons of articles on the web giving different perspectives, such as Josh Catone's article on the Read Write Web website, Scott Karp's article on the Publishing 2.0 website, and Andrew Beaujon's article on the Washington City Paper website. Finally, Trevor Robb's blog on Editing for the Web takes a look at linking as well as multiple other factors to consider when producing an article for the web.

Image by HH-Michael on flickr