On Saturday, my friend Jim Porter and I going to try out a new platform that will help gather Nashville media and give users a real chance to participate in how that news is given to them. I’m also on the lookout for how to build a widget that would do everything I’ve described before, but only for cheap and/or free.

The LinkLove project is happening. That I can promise you.

Image by tonivc

It’s amazing what can happen over the span of a few long dedicated months of repeating the same message over and over again. I started LinkLoveNe.ws  because I felt there was a serious problem with the way local news organizations published content on the web. It was far too much “copy and paste,” with little regard to how  headlines translate to this new medium.I would say it ranked as my number one topic of conversation whenever journalism would come up. And, honestly, I talk about it a lot — at least three or four times daily.

One of the people that immediately understood my message was The Tennessean’s new Social Media Coordinator Erin Cubert. She has been an invaluable force in the effort to teach reporters the importance of linking out to sources mentioned within a news article. It was also through her that I was able to share my message of LinkLove with other willing participants within the publication. Colby Sledge, who bucked traditional procedure during presidential election coverage by using a blogspot account to post the news, has been striving to add links whenever pertinent to his reporting.

I can’t take credit for the individual efforts of anyone at their publication because I’ve only spoken to them in person a limited number of times . However, I will say every time we’ve spoken about linking or social media, they’ve listened to what I had to say and taken it to heart. I’ve been most impressed by Community News Editor Courtney Watson, who routinely assumes the Williamson A. M. twitter account while at work. She facilitates the pocket of Williamson Co. residents though twitter so well that I’ve stayed surprisingly informed about the area  during the last few weeks (and considering I don’t live there anymore that’s a feat). Today she made a few comments (via Twitter) about going through content adding links.

I’m not lying when I say it caused me to smile HUGE. This is what I’ve been yammering about whenever I get the chance. Then, later in the day Erin mentions how often people have been adding links to their own stores without her having to mention it. The Editors (or, whoever is charged with posting content from the Associated Press) were even adding links to stories off of the wire. [Note: this link will be dead soon due to Gannett's Archiving policy. I'm leaving this message up for that very reason.]

Again, HUGE smile. I can’t help but feel like this is a tremendous victory, but also with the understanding that it’s still one small part of a much larger effort to fix the way local news behaves on the web — something I intent to speak about in a future post.

I’ve said this before but never actually written it out:  I may have been pushing hard for people to start adding links to their articles but, I don’t feel like I’m the reason for the shift in their behavior. The credit for that goes to the reporters who began linking to their sources in articles. These reporters did not have to make a decision about increasing the linksharing to their reporting, however, I’m very, very glad they did. Anyways, the point I’m trying to get at is, I’m not the one doing this. It’s them.

I’ve been around journalists and editorial folks for the majority of my life. They are an extremely bright and capable group of people, so it’s not surprising that they finally “got it.” While I did have plenty of time to think about why linking needed to happen, I truly believe they would have figured it out on their own eventually.

All I’ve been doing is bringing them up to speed, which is a role I’ll be happy to continue playing for as long as it takes.

NewsTechzilla

Author sadcox definitely nails it with this post, which seeks to educate people about the concept of linking to other people and why its important. I don’t disagree with this logic at all, but link journalism is the dawn of a new age. It’s going to take more than a few well explained posts on the subject to make everyone start practicing better journalism online.

The LinkLove blog was only created a few days ago so it’s probably just by chance that the headline is similar. It does make me feel good about the namesake. Also, while I’m on the subject, I think the final verdict is to stick with linklovene.ws and when I get further into the widget building with the project itself, pay the $10 to add linklovenews.com to point here.

(More to come soon…)

Anything without a .com on the end of it is sort of risky business when your dealing with a community that isn’t very familiar with the concept of linking or how linking inside articles fits into the grand scheme of the web itself. So despite the obvious coolness factor, I am very hesitant to push out a .ws extension.

Also, I can’t recall seeing many other sites using .ws as anything other than novelty (which is sort of like what I’d be doing, too.) Both del.icio.us and flickr bought their proper names as soon as they became available as well. I’ll have to do some more research before deciding which of the two I really want to use.

If anyone has any suggestions I’d be very grateful to hear them.

Lots of little decisions are still rolling around in my mind like which of the three domain names should I chose as the Main “titled” domain. I also have to push that domain out, and — I will definitely be editing the CSS, if no completely replacing it with a custom theme.

I’m already getting excited about the next few days.