The Knight Digital Media Center at USC Annenberg is hosting a conference with newspaper editors from across the US.

Vikki Porter, who runs the center, reached out online to tackle a key question that emerged during the discussions:

We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info in they can’t meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea. Any hard data would help us.

The reaction of editors is hardly surprising. What Vikki is suggesting requires a fundamental shift in attitudes by journalists and editors.

There is a conceptual issue here in terms of how the nature of journalism changes in a digital, networked environment. Editors should be thinking of their products as a service that is part of a larger network of news.

Due to the Internet, news is changing from being a destination to being a journey. This means that legacy media should be looking at ways of becoming an essential news and information hub in the newsgathering journey of consumers.

In other words, legacy media should not be afraid of linking and sending readers away. People are already finding multiple sources of news via services such as Google News.

Legacy media risks becoming irrelevant by insisting they are destinations and refusing open up to the network. It is reminiscent of the days of the Internet, when companies were trying to keep visitors trapped into their walled gardens.

In 2004, the BBC started experimented with a news tracker that inserted links to news stories from other outlets, and this had no detrimental impact on page views or visits. Instead it was considered as a way of increasing the value of BBC reports to readers by offering them alternative views on the same story.