There will always be “news”, which is to say information that, by virtue of it’s newness and importance, can be stated directly with a only a minimum of information. For example, “Creator X has signed exclusive with DC! He’ll be working on Comic X!” That’s news, I get that. It’s important to site statistics, to the bottom line, to get that out there first.
But I would submit even 2 hours after that ‘news story’ has been posted, any other ‘news site/blog’ talking about that story has a responsibility to bring more to the story than “Here is the news that another site posted! I’m including all of the news they posted, but I’m not adding anything, thereby ensuring that you don’t need to visit their site.” It’s doubly problematic because, while you are linking them you’re creating no reason for your readership to follow that link back to where the news originated, so that’s kinda cheap, AND you’re also adding nothing, because as you yourself have pointed out: the news is already out there, what you’ve done is entirely superfluous. Entirely.
So if you feel like you need to have the information contained within the news item reposted to your site, in part or (sigh) in full, it would be nice if you could add something. An opinion, either yours or that of a colleague of the subject. Or Erik Larsen, he has something to say about everything. Further, if you’re reposting the content of someone else’s news item but it is no longer “new”, but you are doing things like saying “…and no one knows how signing this contract with DC will affect Creator X’s creator-owned work,” then you’re not just superfluous–you’re LAZY. Because let’s face it, if I (me) can call up DC Comics or the Creator in question and get an answer to the question you’re raising, and do it in under 5 minutes, then YOU could’ve done the same thing. You just didn’t want to. You decided the post was good enough, and really it wasn’t. It was weak and lame and you should’ve worked harder.
And here’s the kicker, rather than just reposting the content of someone else’s news, you could’ve generated content! You could’ve had exclusive information–NEWS–of your own, if you could’ve answered how this would affect Creator X’s creator-owned work, which means that everyone would link to You AND the site that broke the news. Cool beans!
Linkblogging is linkblogging, yes, but if you’re going to go to the trouble of pulling what is essentially a link out into its own post at LEAST make sure the 5 Ws of basic journalism are covered before you hit publish. It would ensure a much-better informed readership, and better site statistics for you. Win-Win.
Thanks,
– Chris