Ingram: Adding links is as essential as spellcheck when writing online

MathewIngram.com
Tuesday night, Mathew Ingram and C.W. Anderson provoked an interesting debate on Twitter about whether journalists have a responsibility to link in their stories, with a couple of New York Times staffers questioning how essential such links are for news stories. Ingram, who writes for GigaOM, argued: “Why do we write these articles at all? To inform — and links to further information are part of that duty we owe our readers.” The Times’ Jacob Harris and Patrick LaForge responded that some links are good but not essential, and that Times writers instead focus on producing content worth linking to. Ingram pulled out highlights from the conversation on his blog.

CLARIFICATION: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Ingram recapped the entire exchange on his site; he actually pulled out parts of the conversation. LaForge disagreed with Ingram’s account in the comments on a related post on GigaOM.