For its five-years-old birthday gift, in May 2010, the Huffington Post saw its consultation overtake old-well-established digital emanations of print media. Its monthly traffic reached 12.7 million uniques (that’s 12.7 million single individuals who visited the website) and  more than 50 million visits.

New editorial heroes?

Is it big? The same month, the Wall Street Journal got *only* 8.2 million uniques and the Washington Post 7.9 million. The online news leader remains the New York Times, with 18.9 million uniques. The burning question spreading across all editorial lips is, of course: for how long? If you look at the trends below, coming from two different statistical websites, they show how the gap is closing between HuffPo and NYT:

Huffington Post traffic in red (monthly uniques) Image: Comscore, Huffington Post

(c) Comscore

For all editorial actors playing in the digital world, in a perfect timing with the recent controversy about the quality of pure digital players (well, notably in France vis-à-vis Mediapart, the rise of HuffPo is a good news. Believe it or not, you still have people (even colleagues) who miss the good old days when they was no Internet and who believe nothing really serious ever takes place there. You can’t change the world with Facebook, can you?

Huffington Post is a pure player whose editorial model combines more or less everything we’ve discussed in this series. It started as a collective blog, gathering posts by Ms Huffington and her crew of young wannabes:

“A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its “Bloggers Index”, but includes: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Heather Robinson, Michael Moore, Jimmy Demers, Madonna, Alec Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saskia Sassen, Sheryl Sandberg, John Cusack, Larry David, Nora Ephron, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Anneli Rufus, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Albert Brooks, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Richard Patrick, Craig Newmark, Donna Karan, Kenneth Cole, Ryan J. Davis, Donatella Versace, Bill Maher, Cleo Paskal, B.D. Gallof, Lutfullah Kamran, M. K. Asante, Jr., Robert Wright, Larry Gelbart, Stephen Covey Wendy Diamond and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

I wouldn’t decline a synopsis or two by one of those.

The HuffPo is also a news aggregator, a political media, a participative space with comments and a state-of-the-art integration of social media. Amongst all the things you can share on the website, you also can rate articles via your Facebook account (and hence let your friends know what you think of what you’ve just read). This is smart, because you add your own personal value to the pleasure of sharing a resource.

Oh, and they have photo of boobs (you can rate them too on Facebook and let your friend… hum. Maybe don’t.) This is one of the major criticisms raised against the Huffington Post: they’re not serious. They’re not the New York Times. They write about anything. And their readers like it:

Only 250 like those hands (c) Huffington Post

It is true that Politics only amounts to a quarter of the website traffic and that HuffPost is about almost everything. And true too that they don’t earn money – yet.

« The Huffington Post booked about $15 million of revenue last year », says Henry Blodget on Business Insider.  « Sales boss Greg Coleman thinks the company can double revenue this year to $30 million and double it again next year, to $60 million.  And from there, as long as the site’s traffic keeps growing, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to $100+ million. (…) Now, $100+ million is not the $1 billion or so of revenue of the New York Times. But most of the $1 billion or so of the New York Times revenue is going away (its paper-based ads and subscriptions).  What will be left, eventually, when the NYT’s paper-based distribution finally collapses, are the online revenues.  And those, for now, are in the neighborhood of $150 million. »

Even if Mr Blodget pushes his luck a bit (a smart newspaper won’t quit paper, they will reduce its volume, methinks), the trend is there. Huffington Post is on its way to become one of the major online media.

What can we learn from this for a European institution?

Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves.

As exposed in Henry Blodget’s story, the Huffington Post is a typical case of a disruptive technology. Those technologies, which provoke disruption in a well-established order, don’t need to be better than existing ones (at least at the beginning). « Their advantage – the reason people begin to adopt them – is that they’re also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. » See, they’re not perfect but they work and they please. HuffPost might not be the online media every editorial brain dreams of (even if it’s already enough to fantasize about it IMHO) but people do visit and read because it fits their information needs and because it’s free.

As an European institution, we’ve checked the free part. We might well do our homework on the subversive aspect. Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves. Rather than aiming at the perfect, bulletproof communication strategy or rock solid website in 22 languages, we could try a different approach. This what we did on Facebook and it works.

In general, and Huffington Post is not the sole actor doing this, we should proceed more by trial and error. Implementing a functionality in a few languages or on a selection of pages, extending it or removing it according to its success amongst our visitors. Searching for the better, cheaper, more convenient rather than for the perfect way of proposing a feature every serious website has since 2003.

Guess what? People read what they want to

There is a truth which is not easy to hear: European institutions, when it comes to online editorial news and content, are on a niche market. We indulge ourselves in labeling our visitors as « EU experts », with all the possible declinations (journalists, lobbyists, universitarians), while crossing our fingers about catching some *real* citizens in our (inter-) net. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing bad being a niche market. This is very good marketing segmentation, usually a very profitable one. Some advertisers would happily pay some good money to reach our audience. Our visitors are smart people, international, intellectual…

But we are not in this for the money. We sweat over our stories, editorial concept and content strategies because we want to reach the citizen, my Latvian grandmother, you and, especially, your friends and family who don’t read this blog and have never visited a European Institution website.

There is nothing wrong being a niche – except, maybe, if your aim is to reach everyone. To become mainstream because you believe your editorial production reflects debates, actions and decisions that have an impact on almost everyone at a certain time. If that is your objective, then the remaining inside the niche (who says the Bubble?) will not help you.

« More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story »

What HuffPost teaches us: you can’t tell people what they want to read. They know it and they find it. True, HuffPo covers a lot of subjects, some being more mundane than others. But Ms Arianna Huffington’s pieces are far from being yellow journalism. The Huffington Post covers a wide-range of opinions, always in the American Liberal side. The important word being: « opinions. »

The rising media aggregates posts from other blogs, invites its readers to write and comment, and publishes content from its editorial team. What started as a political blog became the first pure player in five years, just by extending its editorial territory, keeping it free and multiplying its contributors. « More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story » wrote Wired in 2007.

Maybe the real way to reach more than 10 million people a month is to extend our editorial territory. To keep producing and publishing the unique content European Institutions have while multiplying external contributions, opinions, topics. Cooking receipts from all Member States? North psychology versus South therapies? Afghanistan war dispatches? Anything of a certain quality that would appeal to the readers. To apply the recipe explained by Ms Huffington herself:

“Everything is Miscellaneous, is about what happens to institutions, such as news media, when their content gets turned into a big, miscellaneous pile, that anybody can pick out of, and rearrange the pieces. So they lose control over their editorial function, the newspapers do. They lose control over their front page, which obviously is a huge part of their value.

So you look at the Huffington Post, which has a couple of dozen news sources. It presents its own front page. It has its own staff of I don’t know how many bloggers who are writing there. And it is a rearrangement of this miscellaneous pile of news in a way that makes sense to the progressive readers of this site.”

And I haven’t mentioned European boobs slideshow – yet.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age
Here’s What People Actually Want To Read
This is the Future of the News: The Arianna Huffington Interview

(c) Brian Lane Winfield Moore

Meta-enabling journalism has been defined in a series of short tweets by Andrew Golis, Yahoo News editor, I will quote below in their chronological order (reversed to the order in the screen shot illustrating this post). Wait! We gonna discuss an editorial concept drafted in four 140 signs max long sentences? Yep, the world is changing, isn’t it?

The new online business that I’m most entertained by: meta-enabling.
Meta-enabling = writing about lowbrow things in a highbrow way to get the pageviews
without sacrificing the high-end ads or self-regard.
I’m not necessarily opposed to it, can often be used for good.
But I challenge anyone to think of a successful online start-up that doesn’t significantly rely on meta-enabling.

That’s it. The zen online news buddha has spoken and leaves us, small falling leaves lost in the wind, to decipher and discuss.

Andrew Golis' koans about Meta-enabling journalism

First, as a non-native English speaker, I turned to Steve to get the right meanings of highbrow and lowbrow. Highbrow means « intellectual », lowbrow means « popular », like in « pop-culture ». Second, the « meta » part doesn’t refer to the metadatas so useful for enhancing both your search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, but rather to the greek prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.

It involves a conscious consideration of the writing act over the final editorial product with the intention of highlighting the mechanism of writing in order to reveal the artificiality of the style, of the product, of the act of writing in itself.

Here it involves a conscious consideration of the writing act over the final editorial product with the intention of highlighting the mechanism of writing in order to reveal the artificiality of the style, of the product, of the act of writing in itself. Better said here when applied to blogging: « meta-enabling allows blogs to treat the way in which the posts are presented as the thesis of the post itself ».

If you think it’s not clear, try Roland Barthes.

French journalist Vincent Glad renamed meta-enabling journalism in « lol-journalism », turning the latter pejorative expression an old school colleague had used to qualify his work into a fully assumed journalistic method.

« lol » being the famous acronym for « laughing out loud » used in chats, forums, e-mails to express the locutor’s feeling of amusement, Vincent Glad defines the lol-journalist as the one who will maintain a constant level of lol (e.g. fun) in his articles. The lol-journalist walks on a thin editorial line framed by the seriousness of the subject and the seriousness of the angle. As Mr Glad explains, when covering the Greek crisis, the lol-journalist will favor an angle both entertaining and significant, such as the Greek fiscal administration discovering 16.976 swimming pools in a posh district of Athens, out of which only 324 were legally declared. On the other side of its thin editorial line, the lol-journalist will cover a trashy subject, say French soccer players having intercourse with an underage prostitute, under the angle of the media storm that exposed the escort girl in few hours thanks to the digital world we live in.

Here is a diagram, adapted from Mr Glad’s article, to illustrate the editorial concept.

lol-journalism is the blue line, always on the verge between serious and trashy journalisms (c) Vincent Glad

Meta-enabling journalism keeps the money coming.

The reason Andrew Golis states that no online business model can escape meta-enabling journalism comes from the fact this editorial genre is a source of traffic (hence an audience to sell to the advertisers) which keeps advertisers satisfied  and their brands safe from inappropriate content (there is always something serious, either the subject or the angle). Men being men, sex, gossip, and trash will be always favored to economics or politics. Maybe not by you, but by most of us. Yes, that makes you very special.

If you add intelligence in the most lowbrow subject (by being meta-enablingly smart and choosing an highbrow editorial angle for the story you’re writing) – the opposite achieving a similar result (covering a very serious subject with a very funny angle) – then you keep your content valuable and, as advertisers like to say, « qualitative ». Being qualitative is superior to being quantitative, as every bad looking guy would tell you. Of course, the best remains quality in quantity – which is brought by meta-enabling journalism.

Meta-enabling journalism works better if it’s part of an editorial mix rather than a 100% principle of production. It’s an interesting editorial way to bring attention to your website – and possibly to your more classical production.

The Gawker media group, which owns and runs the topical websites Gawker.com, Gizmodo.com, Kotaku.com, Jezebel.com, io9.com and lifehacker.com, is an obvious adept of meta-enabling journalism. Incidentally, the journalists’ salaries are correlated with the number of clics their articles get. It’s well possible you wouldn’t find their main topics serious enough. If you’re not into science-fiction, you may frown upon io9. Seriousness, just like beauty, belongs to the eyes of the beholder. Nevertheless, those websites are quite smart in their mix of the two editorial possibilities offered by meta-enabling journalism, hence satisfying a range of audience from the slightly interested casual reader (who would be caught by the angle) to the deep hard-core fan (who takes his subject very seriously but likes fun reading).

Of course, meta-enabling journalism works better if it’s part of an editorial mix rather than a 100% principle of production. It’s an interesting editorial way to bring attention to your website – and possibly to your more classical production.

As explained, meta-enabling is a tiny editorial line to follow and doesn’t concern all forms of entertainment writing. I personally find that the very appreciated TV RECAP (almost a new genre in itself) praised by The Awl don’t belong to this model.

Could it work for a European institution?

Meta-enabling journalism drives audience and I swear we’d love our main website to become more mainstream. When addressing the general public in our stories, the editors invest energy and talent in their writings to produce as clear and interesting content as our editorial strategy allows them to. This is far from being easy, as discussed many times on this blog.

First, by essence, the subjects we cover are almost exclusively super serious. Like in « democracy », « law making », « ruling the world » serious.

Spicing up our editorial mix with a bit of meta-enabling journalism could certainly bring new readers and sell some subjects better. It could also project a new light on the work, the actors, the influence of the European Parliament.

However, many obstacles prevent us to actually use this editorial model. First, by essence, the subjects we cover are almost exclusively super serious. Like in « democracy », « law making », « ruling the world » serious. The lol culture has not exactly reached our institution nor the people we work with (and for). Men in grey suits wearing ties in blue meeting rooms – not exactly your Mad Men atmosphere. We did publish lighter stories and we do try to produce more of them. We wrote about MEPs’ superstitions, their recommendations for Valentine’s Day, their Easter traditions. But none of those pieces could claim belonging to meta-enabling journalism.

The reasons those as-entertaining-as-we-can-afford stories have kind of faded away from our weekly editorial schedule are to be found in the extended powers of the European Parliament, with an increasing number of important subjects it is our duty to report on, and also our new social-media platforms. The tonality we can use on Facebook is certainly closer to « fun » and is less costly (in terms of resources and time) to produce.

As we ALL have experienced, people can’t tell when a regularly ironic person is being serious.

Another obstacle, very well spotted by The Awl, is the real nature of meta-enabling journalism: this is just a sophisticated form of irony adapted to our digital era, the « hallmark of our ironic, sarcastic, I-can’t-actually-tell-what-you-really-mean age and it *is* causing a problem. (…) As we ALL have experienced, people can’t tell when a regurarly ironic person is being serious. »

Irony doesn’t belong to our box of editorial pencils. Remember all our bragging about objectivity, accuracy, political balance? Right, they don’t match well with irony. EU affairs are complicated enough for our Latvian grandmother that we don’t add the mist of ironic writing. That wouldn’t help. Only insiders, EU Geeks and a happy few from the Brussels bubble would possibly get it.

Last but not least, the meta-enabling journalism is an author-oriented editorial genre. The virtuosity and skills of the writer make all the difference here. The genre satisfied perhaps more the writer than the readers. As civil servants, we are of course quite involved in our work. And we don’t hesitate to be proud of it but we also cultivate a significant self-discretion. The EP and the MEPs prevail. We don’t write for ourselves but for the general public. We don’t sign our stories.

Meta-enabling journalism, which I personally find extremely interesting and entertaining (when properly done) will have to be kept at bay from our editorial strategy. We’ll leave it to the first circle of EU followers and writers, who are in a better position than ours to fully take advantage of it.

And, well, we can always resort to it on this blog.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Tentative de définition du journalisme lol by Vincent Glad on BienBienBien
On Meta-Enabling: A Treatise by The ##
Are You a Chronic Meta-Enabler? by Choire on the Awl.

The rebranding, proposed by Jay Rosen – a press critic, a writer and a professor of journalism at New-York University – satisfied the mainstream editorial geeks. Still, you can find on the web enough of endless lexical discussions about citizen journalism by editorial über-geeks. That’s the thing with editorial people: they love to debate the terms. I’d like to keep this post short, so you can judge by yourself on Wikipedia or on newassignment.net. I call it the Oxford comma syndrome.

Edit: In a comment left on this, Mr Jay Rosen said he “never proposed re-branding citizen journalism as networked journalism” and stated I made up this rebranding. This is true, of course. I had (and still have) the impression that the “citizen journalism” concept lost kind of its appeal after being discussed and criticized by the media corporations and the professional journalists. From “When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism” (definition by Jay Rosen) the concept evolved to network journalism (where citizen and journalists co-produce news).

Mr Nobody wants its 15 retweets of glory

With the Internet, journalists and media people discovered that Mr Nobody not only had something to say about almost everything but that he could do it online, easily and for few pennies. Worse, Mr Nobody could even express himself about what established media were publishing or broadcasting, to the point where it challenged the well balanced order between those-in-the-know and the rest of the world. Well, the rest of the world can now take the floor.

« Citizen journalism », as an editorial concept, opposed « quality journalism ». The latter, as explained by Charlie Beckett, « was for quality people: educated, opinionated, influential, responsible, concerned and powerful. (…) It was different in production, style and above all, subjects and story selection. It was more expensive and expansive, but it was defined primarily by its self-conscious intelligence and its concerns with identifying and arbitrating the exercise of power. »

In the early ages of « citizen journalism », a certain taste of revenge could be discerned against The Media. If not the power, at least the news would be given back to the people. It would be all about who would write it first and tell the truth, the one that The Media did not want you to know. And, in some aspects, it happened.

A possible vision of The Media (c)Micah Wright

Then, came the joke about the « citizen dentist ». Then, more and more journalists discovered they could blog too (and that it was good fun). Oh, and suddenly newspapers started to disappear – or to lose tremendous amount of money, editorial staff were compressed, TV channels discovered erosion in their audience curves – all of this was Internet’s fault. Even the decrease in car sales is attributed to the Internet. Hackers download their cars via BitTorrent, I am told.

Smart news organizations got the hint they could well leave a (virtual) seat in their newsroom to all those Nobodies out there. I’d be harsh if I compared it to the empty chair my family left at the Christmas table for the occasional homeless guy bold enough to knock at our door and be invited to join the feast (he never showed up) but it does echo, doesn’t it? If that was a timid start, it went further. Nowadays, writes Charlie Beckett in the Guardian, networked journalism « takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism: professional and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other accross brands and old boundaries to share facts, answers, ideas, perpectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make the news. And it focuses more on the process than on the product. »

The first aspect of networked journalism is, therefore, to publish under the brand umbrella of a news organization some blogs written by non-journalists (as well as by journalists from the organization). This single co-existence of products of different nature is enough to raise infinite debate about role, advantages, qualities and flaws of contemporary journalists versus bloggers. Not to mention the famous « win-fuck » deal under which most of agreements between bloggers and medias were concluded: the former work and write to be published on a famous news website in exchange for visibility and notoriety. I’ll let you guess who’s the winner.

It’s not about the product, it’s about the process

More interesting to me is this co-production process where non-journalists and journalist work together on a story – whatever the final product might be (a text, a video, a multimedia). Of course, media have not discovered only yesterday they could use people as sources. For every major far away catastrophy, magazines were buying amateur photographs or video footage. As Frédéric Filloux phrases it, « today Twitter has replaced the checkbook ».

Rue89 and Mediapart are two French news websites built on this editorial model, amongst many others. Some major news organizations have added the network journalism model into their mix. « This is the idea that traditional journalism opens itself up to the public » explains Charlie Beckett. « It uses new technologies to include the citizen in every aspect of news -gathering, production and publication. It means using a lot of jargon like crowd-sourcing, social networking, wikis and Twittering. » This is considered by some as a revolution. « That means, adds Mr Beckett, that journalists must accept that they can no longer be the privileged gatekeepers to information nor the sole arbiters of editorial judgement. »

To be honest, as a casual user, I haven’t really noticed the difference when reading the final products. Maybe because the new process works so well you don’t feel the difference. Who cares how many cooks elaborated the risotto as long as it tastes good? Or, possibly, I trust the brand and that’s enough. I read New York Time stories because I trust the New York Time. They have a tremendous fact checking system, they are a reference in the media landscape (and yet, they’re losing money), I like their style. And I read bloggers as well, with different expectations, as noble as the ones leading me to NYT, delivering me a similar yet different pleasure.

Although, networked journalism is used a lot for covering local news, especially in the USA and in the UK. Networks of « hyperlocal » journalists are set up and partnerships created, as Jemina Kiss and Heather Christie tell in Citizen journalism: can small be bountiful?

I must admit I don’t care the slightest for local news. Possibly because I live in Brussels, possibly because I was raised in the countryside where anonymity was at best a dream.  My field is the world, not my street corner.

For news corporations, perhaps in an attempt to help their staff swallow the bitter pill, networked journalism is more critical than a single production process. It is « both a business model and a practical strategy to secure the future of journalism and its freedom » concludes Mr Beckett. He goes further in another article: « anyone seeking to sustain freedom of expression should seek to build networked journalism ».

Wait – should we feel concerned?

We can proudly say we practiced network journalism in two occasion on the European Parliament website. When we handed over the Headlines keys to the young journalists during European Youth Media Day – a fun, tremendous, exhausting experience if you’d ask me. And when we proposed to our audience to send their photos to illustrate a story scheduled in advance. The photographer whose work we appreciated the most was invited to Strasbourg where he could cover the session and propose a slideshow.

There are different obstacles to get over before we can really integrate such a process in our editorial workflow. You may not agree with the importance of it, but, as civil servants, we are bound to respect the institutional Rules of conduct. Those are a good life line to ensure our editorial strategy introduced in a previous post.

Second, the real interest of network journalism lays in the multiple sourcing about an event. The thing is: most of what we cover takes place few hundred meters from where we sit. We don’t really need someone to twit us what an MEP has just said in a Committee meeting. We are watching it via the streaming. Or we have an editor there. Or a Press Attaché.

Of course, opinions, understandings, comments about the subject we report  expressed by external people (citizen, experts, journalists) would definitely add great value. I’m afraid we can’t follow this trail yet. As an institutional website, our role is to reflect a fair balanced view of MEPs’ opinions and decisions, as expressed by their speaches, their votes, their work. We are more located at the source of possible discussion between citizen and MEPs than at the heart of it – as an editorial news website.  We’d better let our visitors react and produce their own content rather than co-produce our stories with some of them.

This doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear the voice of the people – quite the contrary as our Facebook chats, comments and editorial policy hopefully demonstrate. And yes, we would like to bring this back to the flagship website. In a later post, I’ll try to expose the leads we’d like to follow for our new online digital strategy. Before that, there are still other editorial models that are interesting to have a look at.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

Sources

Citizen journalism on Wikipedia

Network Journalism Versus Citizen Journalism Versus the Myriad of Other Names for Social Media in the News World

Press freedom: The public are now becoming partners with journalists in the production of news by Charlie Beckett (The Guardian)

An alternative term to the use of Citizen Journalism, proposed by Jay Rosen on P2P Foundation.

What Is Quality In Networked Journalism? by Charlie Beckett.

Editorial Diversity: Quality Networked Journalism by Charlie Beckett.

The Oxymoronic Citizen Journalism by Frédéric Filloux on Monday Note.

Citizen journalism: can small be bountiful?

Citizen journalists’ shine a light on their own communities (The Guardian)

Links are to Internet what potatoes and mushrooms are to Latvian gastronomy: its quintessential raison d’être. Links are gold and diamonds, structure and tools, brick and mortars. There are no links outside Internet and Internet doesn’t exist without links.

Hence the link journalism for which Wikipedia’s definition goes like this:

« Link Journalism, » a phrase coined by Scott Karp in 2008, is “a form of collaborative journalism in which a news story’s writer provides external links within the story to reporting or other sources on the web.” [5][6] These links are meant to complement, enhance, or add context to the original reporting. Jeff Jarvis, from the Graduate School of Journalism’s new media program at the City University of New York, has said that link journalism creates a « new architecture of news. »

“Publish what you chose to publish, link to the rest” – this is the motto of link journalism, a child concept of participative journalism. The idea behind it is to propose a constant flow of information from all possible sources, with the aim of quickly informing via short (also called micro) contents.

Twitter and link journalism are natural born fit. (c) Brian Lane Winfield Moore

Because this is an editorial concept, link journalism differs of its close parent: the automatic aggregation of news by powerful algorithms, à la « Google News » or provided by the living stories tool from Google Lab or even by Google Flip. Notably, link journalism doesn’t propose extract nor original content from the target it links to. It’s all about subjective selection. As Scott Karp phrases it :

“Algorithms can beat humans at comprehensive web search, but humans should be able to beat algorithms at news aggregation.”

Those robots, they’d link anything if you’d let them.

The dogma here states that information has become so abundant, one doesn’t need new information but rather some help to select and propose what is already available. And who could help better than the news professionals who are the journalists, if possibly all rallied behind an emblematic flag of seriousness and quality? The Washington Post believed in the concept so much it created a Political browser in 2008 (not updated since December 2009) to cover the American elections. By acting so, The Post provided a « stamp of approval » to a choice of stories.

« The Post believes, with good reasons, writes Scott Karp, that a lot of people who are interested in political news and in the Post’s political reporting would find it interesting to get « inside the heads » of Post journalists, to see what the are reading and what is informing their reporting. (…) Political browser is about the « news judgement » of Post journalists – and isn’t that, at the end of the day, what reporting and editing have always been about? »

This online editorial model is used by major news actors, from a single form (« editors choice » or « you may also like those » on media websites) to single publishing activity (aaaliens in France). In most of the cases, link journalism is part of the mix of any serious online publisher. But its share of the cake is growing.

A medium of choice for practicing link journalism is, of course, Twitter. I personally follow @Gamdel and his flock of morning link tweets and @florencedesruol who provides me with a constant flow of interesting links throughout the day. There are million of others just doing this. Outside of a formal media organization, link journalism provides journalists (and bloggers and anyone) with a fantastic opportunity to glaze their personal branding.

The strengths of the model

For news consumers, advantages are obvious. They can benefit from a constant review of the web proposed by journalists they trust. In our new Web 2.0 world, they can rate, comment, share all the links. They are not lost on the internet anymore and the flow of information is now manageable – thanks to the link journalists.

This editorial model serves transparency as well: everyone can access journalists’ sources and understand how they write their stories and where they get their information from.

It’s a double-trust bargain.

Journalists, therefore, turn themselves into “labellers” of information. It’s a double-trust bargain. The reader trusts the media in its selection of the most interesting available resources on the Internet and the media trusts the reader he’ll be smart enough to understand and digest the said resource without any further editing or writing from his part – except for a paragraph of comment coming with the link (the famous micro-content) which plays a teasing role.

And for the publishers? Well, live journalism is, somewhow, cheaper than traditional journalism. Less travel, less investigation. Less creativity, as well, in the choice of original angle to cover the same story everyone is running. Just a bunch of Internet-native journalists paired with a good algorithm and your content is produced. It’s also a great addition to their branding.

…and the weaknesses

If media practicing link journalism are your main source of information, you may feel sucked in a vaccuum of news in endless loop. Whatever happens at 17h03 will be sang ad lib by different medias sourcing the same news providers (usually press agencies or major medias) all at the same time, before the stream of pieces of news is replaced by what happens at 17h17. Some call it the « tyranny of urgency » in which the flow kills the context.

Some call it the « tyranny of urgency » in which the flow kills the context.

Similar grief can be heard from journalists. Not only don’t they feel comfortable with sharing their sources (the sources’ protection is a serious business), but they don’t consider this « import-export » kind of journalism (term coined by Bertrand Le Gendre from Le Monde) as real journalism. At best, it’s a nice evolution for librarians, if only they were not busy dusting off their books so Google can scan them.

By resigning their responsibiity to explain, put things in context, confront different points of view without repeating ad nauseam the facts, journalists feel less, well, journalists.

Also, the use of link journalism by media can become a good way to monetize its more expensive content which would only be available to subscribers – and not be linkable any more. The best content with the most added value would now cost something – the ultimate dream for any news providers and the nightmare for most of digital natives. What? To pay for news? Do me a favor, it’s free as birds.

The dark side expressed by link journalism sceptics forcecasts a new age of darkness for the Internet with no original content to link to anymore. Live by the links, die by the links and all that sort of thing.

Could it work for a EU Institution?

Like a consultant told us the other day, one of the gold mines on our website is our content. People would kill for it, he said – believe it or not. As I wrote in the first post of this series, to be a comprehensive gateway to resources of the website is part of our editorial model. Nevertheless, we tend to remain old-fashioned when it comes to our linking policy – we add them as useful complementary information at the bottom of our stories. We promote some of our content via Visuals and Ads on the top page. When there are long breaks, in summer or in Christmas time, we publish special dossiers providing a selection of the best articles we published in the last months, gathered together under subjective topics (Editors’ choice) or practical ones (Best interviews).

We also use our 22 Twitter profiles to link to stories we published or to interesting videos produced by our twin sister team, europarltv. And on this very blog, we use the Asides on the top page to, precisely, provide our readers with interesting links. (Those asides are mostly written by our talented Asta).

And that’s about it.

It would hurt our feelings to promote super good stories that may not fit with our editorial policy.

In the EU blogosphere, talented individuals do practice link journalism. Best example to pop up in my mind would be the Eurobloggers of the Blogging portal. When it comes to institutions, one flaw would be linking to external sources. You see, we’re having so much interesting content no one reads, it would hurt our feelings to promote super good stories that may not fit with our editorial policy. Also, if there is no shortage of interesting content about the European Parliament – or even the European Union, there is a lack of appealing ones, the kind that explains, illustrates, adds context and keys.

In short, the kind we are struggling to produce every day in 22 languages.

On the other hand, I see some space for link journalism applied to our own content (eg linking only to what’s published on our website). One of our main daily burden is, guess what, the time our editors spend writing when they could do so many other interesting things, like going into meeting to thrill at near-death-by-powerpoint-experiences. One possibility we are working on would imply publishing micro-contents on our home page and linking to more detailed documents or Press Releases. We would, of course, keep producing new kind of content I will describe in a coming post. But to add the link journalism model in our editorial mix in an efficient and helpful way, we would need more content to link to available in 22 languages. Press officers reading this post are already buying voodoo dolls to curse me: they see it coming and they don’t have time nor resources to produce everything they do in 22 languages.

If I am dubious about link journalism as the sole editorial production of any organization, I still believe it can spice up an editorial mix. We’ll keep this one on our radar.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

Sources
Following articles were of a useful help when writing this post.
Wikipedia – link journalism
Journalisme de liens : le Washington Post s’y met – by narvic on novövision
washingtonpost.com’s Political Browser Uses the News Judgment of Journalists to Filter the Political Web – by Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0
The Political Browser on the Washington Post.
Réflexions en roue libre sur le journalisme de liens – by Samuel Laurent on Suivez le geek.
Google’s living stories
Google’s fast flip
Le Net informe mal, il embrouille – by Bertrand Le Gendre in Le Monde (no link, sorry).