The Industry Standard - A new journalism experiment: Source blocks - Comments

I think this is a great idea

Toriach — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:29:11 -0400

I think this is a great idea and one that should be adopted by traditional journalists and new media journalists as well. After all in my opinion the point of journalism is to help people gain information so they can form their own judgements. Source blocks helps with that. I am seriously considering adding the practice to my own blog, and already try to be as open as possible about what has helped to shape any particular article I write. Thank you so much for the idea.

Take care,

Toriach

Hey did you hear The One About...? Well you will if you check out my blog.

This is clearly an idea

John McClelland — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:46:47 -0500

This is clearly an idea worthy of more discussion and experimentation. A few years ago, I began demanding of my students a non-publishable set of source notes with each substantial story. These were to be somewhat like academic references, but less formal. The results have been mixed. Among those of us who require such back-up info, there is considerable gnashing of teeth when students include a source note that is no more than a site's top URL. We reject "nyt.com" and such as insufficiently specific for such notes. So I both admire and fear the use of such brief bits in source blocks. Transparency and linkability are still under-used capabilities of the Web.

I believe readers want more

Kevin Sablan — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:09:28 -0500

I believe readers want more access to "the horse's mouth" than ever before -- mostly because search technology has made it so easy to find those sources quickly. As a service to readers, and to make the block even more helpful to them, hyperlinks really should be included.

To assuage any concerns about traffic, take a look at the success of sites like the Drudge Report and ... Google. Those "trusted referrers" get tons of traffic simply by sending people away.

The challenge (for an ambitious journo-programmer who might be reading this comment) is to make it easy to add those links to your source block.

For many blogs, that challenge is easier to address. Many blogs already link to sources from within the body of a post. But the "link text" is frequently written in a way that doesn't disrupt the flow of thought or break grammatical rules. Having a summary of those links -- a "source block" -- would help readers to quickly see and visit the sourced articles, along with their original headlines and the name of the site that it first appeared.

I was actually toying with that very idea in October. I fleshed the idea out a little more in this post:
http://almightylink.ksablan.com/2008/10/link-to-everything-twice-really/

As for concerns that search engines might mistake a legitimate article as spam, I have faith that the one search engine that matters the most wouldn't make that mistake -- or would fix it quickly. And all the other search engines will need to follow suit to remain competitive.

Thanks for the comments,

Ian Lamont — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:20:39 -0500

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Jason Preston has some additional thoughts about source blocks, and we are reaching out to some other people who may have some ideas about how to improve or promote source blocks.

Some questions to consider:

Are source blocks genuinely useful for writers and readers?

How could source blocks be improved?

What's the best way to evangelize the source blocks system?

Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard

Wonderful idea. Don't know

Liz Carver — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:26:22 -0500

Wonderful idea. Don't know why this hasn't been a journalistic standard to date. I think I'll follow suit next time I write. I believe all sides benefit: the integrity of the writer/reporter/news organization, the sources, and most importantly, the news "consumer", or more commonly known as the reader ;)

Ian, I like this idea. I

Melissa Chang — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:17:56 -0500

Ian,
I like this idea. I have tried this in the past with "stories" that I've written that are more compilations than actual stories, and the sources that I link to have typically been very appreciative of the credit. Seems like there may be just a little too much "borrowing" of ideas and content these days.

I'll be interested to see if this catches on.

Melissa

Ian, interesting approach.

Ken Gagne — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:24:42 -0500

Ian, interesting approach. Source blocks seem a neat way to let your reader know that you're not speaking off-the-cuff but have actually researched your topic. Several bloggers I know would benefit from such a reception.

I don't blog much myself, and not about anything of a grave nature, but I try to work into the body of my post links to any stories I consulted, eliminating the need for a source block. I suppose in some situations that could prove unwieldy.

A new journalism experiment: Source blocks

Ian Lamont — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:03:55 -0500

I've been conducting an experiment on The Industry Standard since late October. After each story that I write, I add a short block of text that identifies all of the sources I used to conduct research. It looks something like this:

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Gambling911, poker-strategy.org, financialservices.house.gov, pokernewsdaily.com, thomas.loc.gov, worldgamblingnews.com, University of Pittsburgh School of Law/Journal of Law and Technology Policy (law.pitt.edu), Brian Cullingworth (gambling911.com).

In the above case, less than half of these sources were directly quoted or linked. The remainder helped me research the topic, clarify issues, and check facts, but they were not mentioned in the story itself.

There are a few things that prompted me to start adding a source block at the end of each story I write. My main concern: Don't readers have a right to know where journalists are getting their facts, or how they are developing their angles and opinions?

In the academic world, students and scholars have very strict standards for citations. Some areas of government and industry are also very careful about documenting sources of information. But when it comes to journalism, the only sources most readers are ever made aware of are those which are quoted or referred to in the body of the article. The migration of print media outlets to the Web has improved the ability of writers to hyperlink certain resources, but many readers never click through to find out what the source is. There is no easy way to tell what sources were used to write an article.

Another reason for adding the source block is my long-standing concern over the influence of the PR industry and their clients. When I see articles about Hillary Clinton's job prospects suddenly popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain without any apparent source other than "talk" or "rumors," I wonder if that talk originated from someone working for Senator Clinton. Among technology publications and blogs, the PR onslaughts are easy to spot, if you know where to look -- a flurry of Techmeme links to an apparent non-story is a dead giveaway that someone's PR agency has been at work on journalists and well-known bloggers. But few will admit that they have been prompted to write a story after being approached by PR pros -- it suggests they've been spoon-fed information by biased sources. Still, don't readers deserve to know?

The third factor that prompted me to include the "sources" block is the knowledge that many writers use a range of sources to conduct research, check facts and ascertain people's opinions. Journalists and bloggers are sometimes taken to task for not doing enough research or regurgitating press releases, but I think it's important for readers to understand that most professional writers do use multiple sources to research articles and commentary. While listing all of the sources can reveal additional biases on the part of the source (such as an official spokesperson) or the writer (he reads that liberal rag?), it can also demonstrate to readers that more than one source is being used to check information or provide a range of views.

The final thing that prompted me to start this experiment was Wired's transparency issue, which came out in March of 2007. One of the themes that Wired explored was how PR and journalists work together to produce a story. Included in the issue was the fascinating backstory (well, fascinating to me) about an incident involving Wired, Microsoft, and Microsoft's PR agency, Waggener Edstrom. I was disappointed that Wired didn't continue the experiment beyond a few backstory sidebars from time to time, but I could understand why: Doing so would require a lot of additional work.

That got me wondering: Was there a way to provide transparency without writing a sidebar for each article? An obvious model was academic-style endnotes. But these also take a lot of work to prepare and format, and aren't very readable.

In the end, I decided to prepare a simple, easy-to-read list of sources consisting of a single paragraph with comma-separated sources. I've found it takes just a minute or two to prepare -- I usually build the list as I am writing, or sometimes check my browser history to verify what I've looked at.

It's not perfect. The most obvious shortcoming is the absence of hyperlinks to specific Web pages not mentioned in the body text. Adding links would not only help readers, but would also notify external sources that they are being referenced by The Industry Standard.

However, I have two good reasons for not doing this: The first is it would take too much additional time to manually add the links, and potentially dissuade others from using source blocks. In addition, having too many hyperlinks in a story sometimes signals search engines and automatic news aggregators that the page in question is not an article or a piece of commentary. This can reduce Web traffic, which would be problematic -- most news sites depend on display advertising, and we need all the help we can get in terms of referrals from Google, Techmeme, and other algorithm-driven websites.

What's your take on the use of source blocks? Is this level of transparency necessary, or helpful to readers? Should the experiment be expanded? Leave your comments in the space below.

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Blog.basturea.com, American Journalism Review (ajr.org), Editorsweblog.org, Glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com, Techmeme.com, thelongtail.com, Washingtonpost.com, Wired. Photo by stan.