By Paul Rodgers

“What do you think the impact of the internet will be?” asked the editor of New Scientist during a job interview I had there in the mid-1990s. It was my cue to expound on Marshall McLuhan’s theories about “the media is the message” and my own about how the internet would change the way we work. When I paused for breath, the editor said: “It’s just a fad.” So much for that job.

It isn’t a fad, and it has changed the way we work. This was drilled home today (18 May ’10) in a seminar with blogger Ed Yong, author of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Yong was talking about the use of links and their importance in modern journalism, providing transparency and ensuring accuracy. It got me thinking.

When I started as a journalist, almost all of the information that went into my stories came from interviewing people, with perhaps a bit of background from the cuttings file (a physical folder with cut out bits of the newspaper stuck to sheets of A4). Of the information I collected during a day, I would discard 80 per cent because it was irrelevant, repeated or just didn’t fit the story I was writing.

Now when I start to work on a story, my first stop is Google, and I’m quickly wallowing in thousands of times as much information as I could possibly use. Gathering information is easier, filtering it harder. When you’re interviewing someone, you can ask specific questions and interrupt them if they meander. If you get much of your information online, you have to be good at refining your search terms, fast at skim reading or both.

Among other techniques I’ve tried to manage this flood with are printing out documents and using a highlighter or copying long web pages into Word so that I can search them for keywords. But I almost invariably end up with a couple of dozen tabs open on my desktop by the time I start writing. Wading through all this material leaves me less time to write, and less time to check.

The last piece I co-wrote, about the WHO reaction to swine flu, was almost immediately attacked online by Gimpy for not providing evidence to back up its assertions. My initial reaction to this was: “Tough, it’s a newspaper article not an academic journal. We don’t do footnotes and we don’t have the blogger’s luxury of links. And we’re under much greater pressure to make our body text interesting.”

But then Yong chose an Indy story to illustrate his point about old-journalism’s lack of links. Tim Luckhurst began his piece by setting out his unnamed opponents’ argument. I saw this as a rhetorical device, common among the commentariat. Yong saw it as a straw man fallacy. Either way, it was weaker than if the writer had been specific.

What hit me, though, was that the piece Yong showed us was the online version. So was the version of the WHO article attacked by Gimpy. Why don’t the web versions of these articles have links? One of my fellow students said that at the Financial Times, where he’s doing an internship, all stories are written as if for the internet, with links. This makes sense.

I’ve resolved that from now on this is how I’m going to work too, even for stories that never make it online. It will at least help me deal with the flood, if not the critics.