“Swallow your pride and link,” said Rick Waghorn of My Football Writer.

We all know the new generation of journalists have to operate on a multitude of multi-media platforms; which is why even us magazine journalists have been learning how to shoot videos, make podcasts, Twitter and maintain a blog.

Yet, in our Online and Mobile Media lecture this week, Rick Waghorn emphasised the importance of linking. He said this is due to the inability to earn a living from Google. Indeed,  in Rick’s view, link economy is a practical solution to time restrictions upon multi-tasking in journalism. 

“It’s called the ‘link economy’ – and as financial necessity proves to be the mother of all re-inventions, take it to heart – do what you do best, link to the rest…,” says Rick on his blog.

Jeff Jarvis agrees, talking about the importance of link economy in his Future of Journalism series for the Guardian.   

Link journalism has sparked conversation amongst journalists and bloggers (such as Daniel Tunkelang) alike.

Publish2 website

Now, there is a site dedicated to it; Publish2 is a social network for links, which has been developed to promote ‘link journalism’ and was co-founded by Scott Karp who explains his idea in this YouTube video:

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wr7hiCCaZ7I]

Journalism.co.uk’s reporter, Laura Oliver described it as: “Designed exclusively for journalists and with the input of working newsrooms, Karp hopes the platform’s news group feature, which reporters can use to create a list of links around a news item, will create more editorial content for news sites without adding to the individual journalist’s workload.”

Linking provides journalists with the opportunity to link to – and share – content between media organisations to ease the difficulties in distribution and solve some of the problems caused by the jobs cuts across the media.

An interesting question was raised in our lecture about content becoming stale in linking; if we rely upon linking rather than doing the job ourselves, surely the same content will be circulated and nothing fresh would be added.

But, in a network – and in collaboration - sharing content seems to be a plausible way of utilising each others’ skills and talents, whilst still contributing. With more information and resources to draw upon, money can be saved in sharing and a story can be told effectively with each aspect generated by those who are best at it.

As Rick Waghorn says, “swallow your pride” and “just get into bed with them.”