Boston Globe Has to Rewrite Gatehouse Headlines and Leads Before Deep Linking

Trying to understand the agreement between the Globe and Gatehouse.

Today's Globe says, Media chains settle lawsuit:

"Under the agreement, Boston.com will be able to refer to stories from GateHouse sites, as it has done in the past, and to manually 'deep link' to individual articles without presenting the links with headlines or lead sentences."

The Nieman Journalism Lab blog makes it clearer, Some confusing language in the GateHouse linking settlement:

So it looks like the upshot is that the Globe can continue to link to GateHouse stories all they want, but that they can’t use any sort of automated tool or the RSS feed to do it. They’ll have to have a human being manually creating the link — and that human will have to write a new headline and summary instead of using GateHouse’s.

Dan Kennedy has more, Settlement details are now online:

...my gut tells me that, by agreeing not to aggregate GateHouse content automatically for its Boston.com Your Town sites, the Times Co. will shift more to a blogging model, compiled by actual human beings, rather than robotically posting headlines and ledes from GateHouse's Wicked Local sites.

"To put it in the language of online-journalism theory, they have to shift a bit from raw aggregation to something closer to curation," writes Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab. I agree — I think that's exactly what we're going to see.

The solution sounds a lot like what my friend Adam Gaffin does on Universal Hub.

Adam is a human filter for news stories and blog posts around the area. He writes witty headlines and posts linking to interesting content.

One thing that Adam does a lot though, is link to reports and interviews. He doesn't copy and paste in the actual article name. By doing that, you lose a lot of Search Engine Optimization, meaning that if someone is looking for a certain subject, the words report and interview are not going to show up.

Here's Adam's most recent post:

Title:
On the plus side, rents are going down

Body:
John Ford posts fourth-quarter apartment-rent numbers for Boston.

The actual title of the post Adam links to is:

First it was condo sales……now apartment rents

How I would have linked to this:

John Ford writes First it was condo sales……now apartment rents showing fourth-quarter apartment-rent numbers for Boston.

That's how many people link to articles. Lot's of blogging tools help do this for you. For example, if you use delicious to share a link, the headline gets copied.

It'll be interesting to see if bloggers take a second look at their linking practices based on this settlement.

What do you think?