There’s a conference at Harvard this weekend about blogging, journalism and credibility. That’s a reasonable topic. The invitee list has caused some discussion in the blogosphere — too many pros? not enough bloggers? Some of this, I think, is just natural “why wasn’t I invited?” peevishness. (I froze through enough Januarys in Cambridge to cure me of any envy.) But reading Rebecca MacKinnon’s FAQ on the conference leaves me with a small sense of deja vu.
There are questions about how blogging and journalism intersect that are worth talking about more, even though we’ve already talked about them endlessly. But there are other questions that arose ten years ago when journalism and the Web first collided (pardon me for donning my old-timer’s hat, but it happens when you’ve been doing something long enough), and that ought to be settled by now.
For instance, MacKinnon asks: “What happens if one of your news organization’s blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate (despite being interesting)…?” This question was first raised in the mid-’90s by mainstream news editors who were hostile to the Web. They asked it because they already had their answer: Links were scary, so let’s not link at all, or only link after a committee of poobahs has said that it’s OK.
The notion that a link is an endorsement is something that died a slow death in the mid and late ’90s, as people who actually spent their working lives on the Web — as opposed to the editors who ran newsrooms and still didn’t know what an URL was — came to understand that an editorial link (one chosen by a writer rather than paid for as part of a business relationship) can be a reference, a courtesy, a footnote, a means of documentation, but that it is not an endorsement. The “endorsement” concept enjoyed a brief revival when Google came along and people worried that if, say, they linked to a Nazi site when they were writing a story about anti-Semitism, they were helping that site out by boosting its page-rank or “Google juice.” Google’s new scheme to defeat comment spam provides the ultimate technical fix to that problem. But even without it, choosing not to link to a site you were writing about, but didn’t approve of, was never much more than a discourtesy to your readers, who’d now have to go Google the site themselves.
Links are part of the vocabulary of writing for the Web. Telling Web journalists they can only link to “approved” sites, or sites whose accuracy is pre-vetted, is like saying, “You can only quote people who you agree with.” If a Web journalist or blogger links to a site and later discovers that it’s “not accurate,” why, then go edit the original story or blog post (and note that you’ve made the edit). Or post again with the new information about why the original link was inaccurate. Or both. The answer is, and has always been, more information, not less linking.
I sat through many conferences in 1996 and 1997 and 1998 that hashed all this stuff over. I’m sure the folks at Harvard have plenty of new controversies to explore; I hate to think Web journalism will be reinventing its own wheels every few years.
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