There are several reasons why most mainstream news organizations have been slow to embrace link journalism.

First, news orgs typically act as though other news orgs don’t exist (blame long-standing notions of “owning” the news, and more recent unjustified fears of sending readers away). Second, news orgs had few mechanisms for breaking out of that walled-garden mentality online — for finding good stories among the web’s reaches, and delivering those stories to readers — even if they wanted to.

But there’s a third, more fundamental, barrier to linking: Many journalists worry about the wild wild web.

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Will algorithms replace human editors on the web? It’s a bogeyman question on one level, but ask any news site about the percentage of traffic they get from search engines — and what the trend looks like — and you’ll realize that algorithms are increasingly deciding what we pay attention to, what is important, what is relevant. It’s part of how journalists and news orgs have abdicated their traditional roles on the web.

And it’s not just Google — news sites are increasingly filled with links generated by algorithms that suggest to readers what else they ought to read. And that’s because most news site still see original content creation as their sole purpose — they don’t see the tremendous need, and the tremendous value in filtering the content that already exists. They don’t see that every link on their site is an important editorial judgment, not an afterthought, not an algorithmic process to set and forget (which often leads to algorithms making bad recommendations, as many news sites who use them will tell you).

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Matt Thompson and Jeff Jarvis have been doing some important thinking on how news coverage needs to change in the Internet Age. They argue that a flow of shallow, time-dependent stories no longer works as a foundation for helping readers understand the world.

Thompson started a blog devoted to exploring an alternative. He writes in the introductory post:

Until recently, newspaper editors defined news as “important developments over the past 24 hours.” … My understanding of journalism is broader. To me, journalism is the constant effort to deliver a truer picture of the world as it is. The “latest developments” provide one lens through which to capture that picture. And as long as journalism was primarily delivered by static media, that lens made perfect sense.

The Web, however, makes possible other ways of delivering that picture of our evolving world. It allows us to shirk the tyranny of recency and place more emphasis on context - the information that often gets buried beneath the news.

Jarvis takes the idea further:

[A] discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.

[snip]

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. … I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed.

I agree with both of them. (Disclosure: Matt’s a friend, and Jarvis is on the board of Publish2, where I’m an editor.) But there’s an ink-stained elephant in the room that needs to be faced if Thompson’s feeling that “we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism” is to come true.

I’m talking, of course, about the Associated Press.

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Someone posted a false report that Steve Jobs had heart attack to CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport. The fallout (which could include an SEC investigation) lead to the inevitable question of whether this is a failure of citizen journalism.

It’s not. It’s a failure of open systems.

As Sarah Perez points out at ReadWriteWeb, ANYONE can become a citizen journalist on iReport:

Apparently, it’s as easy to become a citizen journalist on CNN as it is to sign up for a new web app from an internet startup, if not easier. The process involves nothing more than filling out a name, screen name, and email address. Adding a phone number is optional and only necessary if you want the story to be considered by CNN. There’s a CAPTCHA to prevent bots and an email confirmation link, but thanks to disposable email addresses, those are practically a waste of time these days.

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washingtonpost.com has launched a new politics page called Political Browser, which features, wait for it… links to the most important and interesting political news around the web. That’s right, the Washington Post, one of the paragons of original political reporting, has dedicated a page to help you find the best of OTHER news organization’s political reporting.

Crazy? Well, actually it makes perfect sense.

I spoke with Eric Pianin, the Politics Editor for washingtonpost.com, who explained that The Washington Post sees an opportunity to extend their highly respected politic news brand to filtering the political web.

And filtering is a BIG opportunity on the web.

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Yeah, fine, so Drudge gets lots of traffic for links, but we’re not Drudge, so it won’t work for our news site, right? Wrong. Here’s a case example from Knoxnews.com’s sports site GoVolsXtra.com.

This roundup of links to coverage and commentary on the Vols’ loss to Florida was the MOST VIEWED article today on GoVolsXtra.com.

You could explain the page view count in one of two ways (or both). First, lots of fans like these roundups, and seek them out when they appear as a story on the homepage. Or, people clicked on a link, then came back for more, generating more page views.

Either way, a win.

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I happened to visit Facebook’s Business Solutions page, and was struck by how, at least on the surface, these advertising formats seem like exactly the kind of innovation that should be helping Facebook achieve Goolge-style revenue — which is of course what Facebook’s $15 billion valuation assumes will happen.

And yet with 100 MILLION users, Facebook’s 2008 revenue was only projected to be $300 million. (The number may higher, haven’t seen, but it would be big news if it was much higher.)

Can you imagine a traditional media company with 100 MILLION viewers/readers/subscribers and only $300 million in revenue?

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The front page of the newspaper used to set the news agenda. Extra, Extra, read all about it! But that influence has steadily waned through the TV and Cable News era, and the web now threatens to obliterate it entirely.

So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence is a guy with nothing but a page full of links (you know, the kind that “send people away”).

In a post the other day, Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called Drudge “the single most influential source for how the presidential campaign is covered in the country.”

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