Is linking just polite, or is it a core value of journalism?
a discussion triggered by the Wall Street Journal's failure to link to a blogger's scoop
it's not just rude when the WSJ fails to link to others who broke news -- it's an issue of trust: bit.ly/wDSEoj- Hillel Fuld, a technology writer, said that it was irrelevant whether MG Siegler wrote about the news, because the WSJ had confirmed it independently:
- I said that I thought it did matter -- and then Wired writer Tim Carmody said that linking wasn't a matter of trust, but simply a feature that some stories might have and others might not:
- At this point, Felix Salmon from Reuters also said he didn't understand how this was an issue of trust -- since he trusts the WSJ to tell him the news:
- @felixsalmon: the issue is that not linking, when you know that there is another story that has the news, makes me trust you less
- Tim Carmody mentioned that I wrote a post about journalistic credibility, but didn't mention that he and I had talked about it on Twitter, and didn't link to his tweets:
- I said that to me, a story involving news that someone else broke was somewhat different, but that linking was an important thing regardless:
- Tim said that the Wall Street Journal's policy is not to link if the newspaper has independently confirmed the news:
@mathewi But what if your paper's policy says don't do that? As @felixsalmon points out, it's culturally determined; UK doesn't, WSJ doesn't- Felix Salmon argued to me and New York Times editor Patrick Laforge that linking to sources of information is different than crediting other sites with scoops:
- but I said I don't think that's true:
- Felix also agreed with Adam Penenberg, who said that there is a difference between a real scoop that you alone came up with, and news that would eventually break anyway:
