Kevin: Ryan Sholin makes the argument for why linking is important to digital journalism. It’s difficult for journalists who base their professional sense of self on authority on to why they should link off to other sites or sources. For me, it’s an issue of transparency and depth. It allows readers to get as much or as little of a story as they want. Ryan has some other good arguments including this one: Linking “is the key gesture to being a citizen of the Web and not just a product on the Web”.

Kevin: I met Ulrike Langer at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2009, and it was great to hear from a journalist who had recently discovered blogging and had really caught the bug. Here she writes up an excellent list of 10 strategies to move journalism forward now. These aren’t speculative projects but projects actually happening now in multimedia, crowdsourcing, data journalism and citizen funding. I wholly endorse her view that we need to be on the watch for new tools that help us improve efficiency and deliver content to where users are instead of forcing them to come to a destination website or choose a platform.

Kevin: Publishing, Sharing & Content Management, Blogging, Dictionary & Spell Check, Organization, Mind mapping, Communication, Media and other tools. All open source.

Kevin: Chris Thorpe from the Guardian developer team writes about how he created a hack using Google Wave (a new real time collaboration and communication protocol) and the Guardian Content API.

Kevin: Graduates of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism are getting jobs. “Of the 306 students who earned degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism last month, 197, or 64 percent, already reported having jobs or other post-school plans (such as internships, fellowships or continuing education) lined up by May 28, according to Elizabeth Weinreb Fishman, the school’s associate dean for communications.” That’s better than last year. And the grads are finding jobs at media companies that have gone through waves of layoffs, such as the New York Times. Jeff Bercovici writes that he believes the companies are simply letting go pricey editors and journalists in their 40s and 50s and hiring younger staff who will work for less.