Should links be "need to" instead of "nice to"?
On Thursday, the 5th of February, Danish Online News Association (DONA), of which I am a member of the board, had arranged a panel discussion regarding links and the Danish online media.
The panel consisted of Kasper Heine from law firm Bender von Haller Dragsted (BvHD), Anders Lassen from Digital Publicists and Infomedia, Nikolai Thyssen (who is also on Twitter) from Danish online news paper Information.dk - who has a different viewpoint on links that some of the other online media - and the discussion was moderated by Henrik Føhns (also on Twitter) from DR — the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
While I am not going to give you a summary from what was said at the discussion (I did some live coverage in Danish) I will focus on a point, that a journalist from the Danish Computerworld made and Nikolai Thyssen supported:
When you quote someone or something online and you can link to your source, you have to link.
Here in Denmark we have something called "citatretten" (roughly translated: "the right to quote") which states a fair use when it comes to quoting other articles. What if you could add the "need to link" to this?
No doubt that linking is a central part of the internet's backbone — and a great service to the readers — and maybe it's time to get our quotation rules upgraded to the online world that we are a part of?
Kim Elmose (who also blogs in Danish) have written a link manifesto that Kristine Löwe translated into English (thank you, Kristine!) — from there it was translated into Romanian — where we state six laws:
First law: We link to the sources for the data we use in our journalistic products. If we have read, seen or heard important new information on an external site - for instance about companies, people or surveys - we will link to it.
Second law: We link directly and precisely to the information we use from external sites. In this way we provide proper service to our readers rather than just linking to the front page of the external site.
Third law: We are precise in our information about where a link leads to; about who has produced the information we link to and when. The readers should know where it takes them when they follow a link.
Fourth law: We recognise that an article consisting of precise links to information that represents different angles on an issue is a journalistic product.
Fifth law: We are open to inbound links to our own news sites because we want to be an integrated part of the web’s ecosystem
Sixth law: We aspire to making it easier to link directly to our articles.
Photo from the panel discussion by Kim Elmose
Left to right: Henrik Føhns, Nikolai Thyssen, Kasper Heine and Anders Lassen