The Project for Excellence in Journalism published its State of the Media report for 2008 in March that year. Two of the trends it identified were picked out here as the ones that mattered: that news was shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, website or newscast — to being a service, and that “a news organization and a news website are no longer final destinations”.
That was worth saying at a moment when some newsrooms were still debating whether to link out at all. The argument built on it was that online news sits inside a network of connections, so news becomes a journey rather than an endpoint, and the outlet’s opportunity is to be the hub someone passes through. The analogy was an airport: the one with the most connections is the most valuable to travellers. By the same logic the value of a news site rises with the number of links it offers to material elsewhere.
Outlets had no choice in the matter anyway. Readers moved between sites with a click or searched for a single item, and a news journey increasingly started at an aggregator such as Yahoo or Google News. The report put the cost of ignoring this bluntly: a site restricted to its own content “takes on the character of a cul de sac street with yellow ‘No Outlet’ sign, reducing its value to the user”, and every page of a site, even one holding a single story, is its own front page competing with everything else published on that topic.