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The newspaper is not a transmission of facts or truth. Rather, it is a form of drama.

There is a lot of conversation about link economies, and particularly the AP’s linking guidelines.

In a link economy, the implied transaction is that bloggers, aggregators, and others get to excerpt a story, and in return, link to that story, driving traffic to the original content creator.

(Sidebar: I want to specify that we’re talking just about the link economy around news articles. Linking to a news piece is different than linking to, say, Travelocity. If Google links to Travelocity, a user *has* to follow the link to get any value from Travelocity. News articles are different. Those links most often consist of headlines with excerpts, from which the user gets part of the story and gains value even without a click.)

It is incredibly difficult to answer that question in real economic terms, so maybe it’s the wrong question to ask.

But it’s clear that a lot of publishers often don’t *feel* it’s fair. In fact, they feel hurt.

Establishing policies to try to force things to be “more fair” isn’t a durable solution. Is there some scenario where things can fall into a natural equilibrium? What positive actions can publishers take to affect the balance?

In the traditional inverted pyramid news article, much of the value of the article is in the headline and the first paragraph. That makes it hard to link to the article and *not* give away a good chunk of value.

So one question is: what can a publisher to do *pull* more traffic through that link? How can they create a link that doesn’t give away a big chunk of the value of the page it links to, a link that is truly a taste of what’s to come?

• Make full use of the medium. Tell stories through a mixture of text, photographs, illustration, audio, and video. It’s probably the best way to tell some stories anyway - this is a multi-media-medium, after all!
• Make it about following, not reading. Make living stories, not static documents. Give people a reason to come back. Publish early and often, with continual updates. Maybe stories should be blogs, rather than articles. (What if every story had a twitter feed?).
• Feature-style writing, in longer form with longer arcs. I have to imagine that links to features (like this) can a generate lot more click-throughs than links to inverted pyramid-style news reports. (Question to our friends in publishing: do you have any data on this? If so, please post to the comments)
• Rethink the boundaries of a story. Don’t limit stories and pages to just events. Longer story arcs. Topics that live and grow that are continually refreshed. Diaries. Themes.
• User-participation. Community. Comments.
• Emphasize the journalist - give readers another “node” to follow. The NBA markets it’s players, maybe publishers could try the same?
• Aggregate - so the story can have more scale and depth, easily.

I always applauded the experiment Kevin Sites and Yahoo! did with In The Hot Zone. I’d love to see more journalists experiment with how they tell stories, and what stories are in the first place, as Kevin did.

P.S. - I laughed when I saw this. The extreme way to make people follow a link: make it really hard to cut and paste.  (via laughingsquid). All the text is an image!

Upendra Shardanand, Jun 2008