As usual, Jenny says this well....
Links and NPR: Two Ships Passing In The Night. I'm going to highlight NPR's revised linking policy once and (hopefully) only once. As Cory notes over at Boing Boing and as David notes over at TeleRead, NPR still doesn't seem to "get it." Apparently the form for formally requesting to link is gone, but they still reserve the right to withdraw the permission they aren't formally giving anymore.
Here's how I think the folks at NPR should think of linking: news sources. When NPR does a story about any given subject and they interview someone, it doesn't imply an endorsement. Their reporters don't stop using quotes or audio excerpts because in a sense, that's journalistic linking. You get to hear that person's words from the horse's mouth, in context. And that's all linking is - providing a direct route to the horse's mouth. A linker might add commentary around the link, but the link itself points back to the original without the commentary. Therefore, no endorsement.
So if the NPR staff takes a moment to think about linking in that context, they'll realize how unrealistic and restrictive their policy is. Imagine NPR without external sources for their stories. It's difficult to do because it would pretty much become talk radio. Better yet, imagine an interviewee in an NPR story calling them up after a segment airs and saying, "I disapprove of what you said, I don't endorse your story, and I demand that you take it down from your site immediately." All of a sudden, NPR calls journalistic smackdown on the interviewee, cries ethics, and refuses. As they should - no self-respecting capital "J" Journalism outfit should ever rescind a story because the subject doesn't like it.
Same thing with the web. Why should bloggers or anyone else have to get sanction from NPR in order to link to the horse's mouth? The web without unrestricted linking is like NPR without external sources - it just doesn't work because it removes the very foundation upon which the service is built. It takes away the connectedness, context, and flow.
Hopefully NPR will eventually come to this realization, because all they're really going to do is waste their own time and resources tracking links, sanctioning links, and paying lawyers to send threatening letters, all the while becoming the butt of an ever-growing web joke meme. You can bet that every story about linking ever will refer to NPR and that it will become the poster child for web cluelessness.
I don't think that's the end of the horse NPR wants to be seen as. [Jenny Levine: Tech Goddess]
8:10:01 AM 
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