A lot of research can go into a piece of reporting, and in print the value of that research can only be passed on through brief quotes or references. But on the web, no longer limited by finite column inches, newsrooms can create huge value for readers by providing links to the source material that journalists have gathered.

Want some proof that readers value these links to reference material? Nick Carr has been getting requests for links to all of the interesting source material he used in his Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — enough to prompt him to post those reference links on his blog.

The question is, why now, only after readers made their interest known, and why on his blog and not at TheAtlantic.com, where the article is published?

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Responding to the investigation of plagiarism on the web by Jody Rosen at Slate, Publish2’s Editorial Director Tammi Marcoullier reflects on her own experience with being plagiarized while blogging for The Washington Post and wonders whether placing more value on link journalism could help with the problem of plagiarism among journalists. Check it out at the Publish2 Blog.

As newspaper companies lose billions in market capitalization and innovation-minded journalists battle newsroom “curmudgeons” shell-shocked by the rapid pace of change amid increasingly dire economic realities, a lesson in burn-the-rule-book transformation might come from an unexpected source: General Motors. That’s right, the once-dominate car maker, which missed every trend that has lead to Toyota’s dominance, from quality to environmentalism, is betting the farm on a radical approach to a radical new car — and risks going down in flames if it fails.

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For several days my brain has been connecting the blogstorm over AP trying to dictate how much of their content can be quoted on the web with the “quote” that Nick Carr lifted from one of my blog posts in his Atlantic article — I finally figured out why. The problem with the AP isn’t really about linking, it’s about quoting. And the problem with quoting is that, now that anyone can publish any thought or idea on the web, and anyone can link to it or reproduce it, the whole notion of quoting and citation has been completely turned on its head. Let me try to explain.

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The Associated Press is facing a blog firestorm after issuing take down notices to Drudge Retort for linking to and reproducing snippets of AP stories. AP is now attempting to define how their stories can be linked to and excerpted — and the response from the blogosphere appears to be to boycott the AP, i.e. not link at all. This is a huge opportunity for local and national news sites to be the sources that bloggers and social news sites link to instead of the AP.

Take the story of flooding in Iowa, for example. The AP is covering this story extensively, as you can see in this Google News search result. But local news media in Iowa is also covering the story extensively, as you can see in this search limited to Iowa sources — the story is happening in their own backyard, giving these local sources a unique perspective and knowledge.

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Google is taking a big shot at Facebook in the PR war over data portability and social network interoperability. I signed in to Google Friend Connect, implemented on the Go2Web2.0 blog, and saw this:

Normally, you wouldn’t list a service that isn’t a partner, but in this case Google chose to list Facebook and let users know loud and clear that they can’t connect to their friends on Facebook because the feature has been DISABLED BY FACEBOOK.

This is subtle in some ways, but in others it’s as big a smack as Apple’s brilliant I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ads.

Google is betting that hell hath no fury like a user denied access.

Probably a good bet.

Since I already drilled a nerve with What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web, which is on its way to becoming one of my most linked posts ever — and since everyone loves a sequel — I thought I would do a follow up for magazines. The lessons, of course, apply to every print publisher, who constantly discovers new ways to frustrate web users by prioritizing print over web.

This time I’m going to pick on The Atlantic, which like the Washington Post is a publication I have a great deal of affection for (published by my former employer Atlantic Media), so this is not a general critique but rather a very specific example representative of a much larger industry-wide problem (i.e. I could find instances of the same problem on virtually any magazine website).

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On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs. Those were the main points of my critique of newspaper websites generally, and WashingtonPost.com in particular, which to be fair, apply to all online publishers, and really any website. I’m writing another post on this same topic because the issue is so fundamental to the future of media, news, publishing, and journalism, that it really can’t be over-emphasized or over-clarified.

In print, a design flaw is unlikely to cause a reader to abandon a newspaper or magazine entirely — they are a largely captive audience. But it will cause them to abandon a website.

Google understands this better than any web company, which is why they are the most successful. Google is obsessed with making sure its users never fail, no matter how “stupid” they are. Google makes users feel smart. That’s why they keep coming back.

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