News Sites Loosen Linking Policies

This is the fear of linking I have talked about earlier: the fear of hyperlinks is as old as the Internet itself, and with blogs, it just manifests itself much more deeply and clearly. Most sites now have to come to terms with it, or lose out.

“Outside linking is not only not a problem, not only a non-issue, it’s a necessity; it’s Web-smart; it’s what the audience expects of us,” says Advance.net president and creative director Jeff Jarvis, a blogging advocate.

However, NYT, which has a couple of e-mail newsletters which do outside-linking very liberally, takes an opposite view, at least officially: “Our goal is to be a full-service news site, so on the news verticals we primarily offer Times articles. We choose not to link to other news sites because either we have the content ourselves, or we will post a wire link until a Times report becomes available via our Continuous News Desk.”

Which is funny, because having known people inside NYTimes.com for some time now, I know all of them are very very weblog savvy, read tons of weblogs, and yet have this dichotomous relationship with blogs. It is this “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” policy, in some senses.

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