How can you tell the difference between articles of big media and blogs?

Large majority of old-media that moved to internet has a very strict rules that they should never ever link to sites outside their conglomerate. If by some coincidence they do, they put all the links at the end of the article and make them as unnoticeable as possible.

The official line is that they are afraid to be held responsible for accuracy of the content they link to. The true reason is that either newspapers and TV-derived sites are trying to prevent their readers leaving or their journalistic staff simply hasn’t caught up with the meaning of the web yet.

I’ve seen a lot of both. From my time at RTV Slovenia I can tell that a lot of journalists (with exceptions!) haven’t grasped the idea of a reader/viewer being able to do basic research on their own. This is somehow excusable, big cultures are slow to absorb new concepts. There is not much that can be done (except waiting). However the first excuse - being afraid of losing readers - is really just an unexcusable strategic mistake.

Not providing to the audience direct links to referenced and relevant documents is actually a missed opportunity to fulfill the real need of curiosity. Missed opportunity to be user’s starting point of inquiry into any topic.

And then media companies complain how search engines are capturing all the users by leveraging other’s people content. Well, it is the media companies that are refusing to be the user’s home base which he can actually leave to explore the wilderness.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Why the Newspapers Still Don’t Get It - re:Linking [centernetworks.com]
• The Future of the Social Media Release is in Your Hands [briansolis.com]
• Alexandre Prokoudine: Five golden rules for a journalist [prokoudine.info]
• One quick note on Frank Rich [dailykos.com]