Sometimes I feel like I’m running a one man campaign to encourage mainstream media organisations, the one I work for included, to acknowledge and link to the great content that’s already available on the internet.
Make no mistake, I really am talking about linking to someonelse’s website and sending traffic away.
So I’m always happy to come across examples of forward thinking news and media orgs doing exactly what I’m always evangelising about, like the NY Times linking to a video of Zidane’s worldcup headbutt – on YouTube – as reported in MediaPost. John Burke disects this on The Editors Weblog where he says:
Where in the past news organizations would admit that they were beat by another, readers are now more appreciative if their favorite publication can direct them to worthy content elsewhere. Traditional news organizations will continue to perfect the art of linking as the Internet develops, an act that will increasingly be a part of quality, transparent and transforming journalism.
Another example (from the BBC – where i work!)
Paul Mason (the business correspondent on BBC2’s Newsnight) has been linking to Youtube in several posts recently on his BBC blog. For example this post about the Zidane head butt spoofs/parodies.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulmason/2006/07/more_zizou_and_nuclear_malarkey.html