Quartz’s practice of ‘linking out’ renews attention to aggregation debate
CJR | The New York Times | Knight Science Journalism at MIT | Nieman Journalism Lab
CJR's Hazel Sheffield took a look at the new publication Quartz and didn't like a few things: links take you away from the site, there's no commenting, infographics aren't interactive and It didn't have enough original content when she looked at it.
CJR's Hazel Sheffield took a look at the new publication Quartz and didn't like a few things: links take you away from the site, there's no commenting, infographics aren't interactive and It didn't have enough original content when she looked at it.
One example: of the 13 stories that appeared under the heading “Energy Shocks” in the site’s first five hours, eight were either sponsored or aggregated.With the caveat that I have no idea what "Energy Shocks" are, I view getting five original stories out in five hours as working at a pretty good clip. Quartz Senior Editor Zach Seward responds to Sheffield's dismay about Quartz's linking practices in the comments:
Our goals are just to cite our sources, acknowledge that there's a whole wide world of great business reporting, and point our readers to material they should see. Only CJR could manage to view the presence of links as a sign of weakness. That's kind of perfectly captured by your complaint that some links on Quartz don't open in a new tab by default, "a curious decision by a new site hoping to get people to stick around." Hah! No. We're thrilled if readers leave Quartz because we've pointed them to great material elsewhere because we know they'll love us for it and come back for more.(more...)
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