Many online media outlets continue to rewrite news without providing a link to the original source, but doing this is both rude and short-sighted: Linking is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet and a crucial part of the culture of the web.
Every so often, a controversy erupts over something that seems relatively simple: Namely, the concept of linking to (and thereby giving credit to) the source of a news report. In one of the most recent examples, Instapaper founder Marco Arment — who broke the news about a wave of corrupted apps in the Apple store — kept track of both media outlets that repeated the news and whether they gave credit to him or not. Some did but others didn’t, and some hid their links or otherwise tried to make it look like they broke the news themselves. There are a number of reasons why this kind of behavior is still so common a decade after digital media became mainstream, but none of them justify it. Simply put, linking is a core value of the web, and if we lose that then we have lost something incredibly important.
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