Comments on: Should Journalists Be Required to Link to Inspiration Sources?

By: Career Subreddits to Inspire, Motivate, and Empower You by @BryceChr | Spin Sucks

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:00:51 +0000

[...] leads to the third way of finding useful subreddits…the helpful links [...]

By: Making the Hop from PR to Media Operations, Part 2 by @JuliaWallClarke | Spin Sucks

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:02:15 +0000

[...] Always do your research. I didn’t have a prior background in tennis or road cycling and hadn’t even heard of biathlon when I was assigned to it in Vancouver. You can run news conferences and workrooms without knowing the sports intimately, as there will always be experts on hand to consult, but you will have far more credibility with media if you are familiar with the history and rules of the sport and know the leading athletes to look out for, especially when working in the Mixed Zone. [...]

By: ginidietrich

ginidietrich — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:06:50 +0000

@etelligence REALLY interesting point about SEO, Adam. I hadn’t even considered that.

By: etelligence

etelligence — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 18:30:33 +0000

I always acknowledge and link to antecedents, in fact I’ve always been under the impression by Google that if your blog content was totally devoid of external links to contextually relevant articles that it would hurt your rankings in the SERPs, with only .edu sites being excepted. I remember seeing a few case studies several years ago that seemed to verify that.

… but I have to agree with you in the case of the Sloane article. They may as well have linked to Facebook because there was far more said about it on Facebook than anywhere else – the fact that NextJen Journal had Facebook commenting enabled is the primary reason that Sloane’s article went viral while dozens of other articles in a similar vein never did.

I even wrote an article titled something like “Why You Shouldn’t Let a 14 Year Old Manage Your Social Media”. I never read the Hollis Lady’s article though. I probably did see it tweeted (I remember purposely parodying the title from someone else’s post), but I never read any of those articles because I already knew what they’d say.

By: ginidietrich

ginidietrich — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:43:08 +0000

@ToniAntonetti So, if you read an article and it causes you to write a blog post about it, you don’t think it would be nice (if not required) to say, “In the U.S., Inc. wrote an article including the 11 reasons a 23-year-old shouldn’t run your social media. We dig some digging on both sides of the argument and this is what we’ve come up with.”??

By: ginidietrich

ginidietrich — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:41:51 +0000

@danatanseo Ha! I hadn’t thought about it that way. I think, like anything else, there are some really great and ethical journalists and some not so much.

By: ginidietrich

ginidietrich — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:41:12 +0000

@WarrenWhitlock I feel like I should write a blog post with this comment and not credit you now.

In all seriousness, this is the side of the fence I land on. But, in this particular instance, the editor admitted he had read the original article and it is what inspired their piece. So why not link to it?

By: Review of Content Marketing Measurement Platform Squeeze | Spin Sucks

Review of Content Marketing Measurement Platform Squeeze | Spin Sucks — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:26:04 +0000

[...] well, the blog post I wrote on Monday about whether or not you should link to your inspiration sources is the top content for the past [...]

By: molasses_jones

molasses_jones — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:02:29 +0000

@helpareporter @SpinSucks ABSOLUTELY… actually so should everyone else.

By: ToniAntonetti

ToniAntonetti — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:20:39 +0000

You’re only required to link to a post or article if you mention it or quote from it. If you were INSPIRED by it, it would be pretty ridiculous to have to attribute inspiration. Likewise, we’d require network TV shows that are “ripped from the headlines” to attribute their inspiration, too. Won’t happen. BTW, just covered the topic on my PR Chicago blog today (no, I hadn’t read this post, but I did link to some of the articles).