News Tools: Aggregate now!

The News Tools 2008 conference opened with a list of the Top 10 Disruptions/Innovations Reshaping Journalism. It’s an exciting and daunting list.
I went to a follow up discussion of item number 4 on the list: Aggregation, linking, tagging, filtering. About a dozen people heard from Scott Karp, CEO of Publish2 and Vineet Gupta, tech evangelist at DayLife Inc., discussion leaders who strongly recommend that news sites increase their links from their own stories to related content on other news sites.
The way to build the brand of a site, Karp said, is to make it a “destination not just to what its limited resources can produce but what the whole Web can produce.”
For example, Karp said, a story on local water quality problems might link to stories about similar problems and solutions in other communities.
Learn from Google, which does “nothing but send people away and people keep coming back again and again.”
That advice makes sense. Who can argue with Google’s success? Still, many news organizations have been slow to using extensive linking out of fear of helping a rival site or linking to a less than credible story.
Those are valid concerns. But reluctance may also stem from old newsroom attitudes about control that are no longer useful in a new information and news environment, one where the reader has a vast array of choices and one role for a news site is to point to some of the best ones. Karp calls that “link journalism,” and it doesn’t necessarily mean linking to anything and everything.
Does your site routinely link to content on other sites? How do you decide when to link and what to link to?