Besides writing letters, Matt Koehler also leaves comments on newspaper websites. Recently leaving a comment that included a link to a New West story on the Missoulian's website, Matt got the following email response from an editor:
Matthew,
I am not going to post your comment sending Missoulian readers to New West. We wrote many stories on this press conference and the fallout, and you are free to direct them to those archived accounts -- which are very complete.
Matt commented on another story today, including a link to a Missoula Independent story, but that link was approved.
I honestly doubt there's any sort of guiding policy at the Missoulian that dictates references to competing media not be allowed. Rather, I think the editor probably felt a little annoyed by the fact the paper's writers had done a decent job of covering the story Matt referred to, and that the decision to deny the comment was made because Matt is a known and frequent contributor to the Missoulian in letters, comments, quotes, and editorials. I doubt the editor would have denied a comment to a new or infrequent user.
Still, it's interesting, isn't it? In the "old" days, you could effectively starve out the competition by pretending they didn't exist. The key to becoming known was controlling distribution; if you didn't have the means to produce and widely distribute your newspaper or newsletter, you were slave to word-of-mouth to get people to seek you out.
But nowadays, the reverse is true. To gather readers, you've got to connect to other media. Reading news online isn't about sitting down with a single periodical and reading it cover-to-cover, it's about following links and reading a broad selection of stories about topics of interest. That is, the best way to draw readers is to lead readers elsewhere. If you're a dead end, a self-contained entity that leads nowhere, Web surfers will avoid you. (And that's doubly true if your web page is ugly and difficult to navigate.)
In short, if the denial of Matt's link is a policy at the Missoulian, it's incredibly antiquated and short-sighted. |
