Paul Bradshaw continues his essential series on Newsroom of the 21st century with a look at what should happen to your story after it goes online.

He amplifies a great point about the permanent nature of a webpage and its place as an anchor for your story to develop.

I like this idea. Almost a year ago I posted on the idea that the web was really a whole range of stories waiting to happen:

On a macro level the web edits itself. We throw stories online and they find a place. Sometimes that place remains unknown until another story takes an audience there and the content is discovered. It wasn’t an editor who made that connection. The web enabled me to.

But Paul’s takes this to a much higher and more reasoned level co-opting the five W’s and one H of journalism 101 to great effect.

What I would recommend is re-reading Paul’s previous two posts to really get the flavour of the concepts he puts forward.  A lot of what he talks about in this article should be seeded in the way we collect and report on stories.

When he suggests the question “What did the journalist read to write this?”  he mentions social bookmarking.

This should be part of routine practice already, but through a combination of resistant journalistic culture; clunky CMS’s; and lack of time, journalists still don’t routinely link to their sources. So, we need a way to make this happen.

But how many journalists use social bookmarking as part of their reporting routine? More to the point, how many know what it is?

I talk to my students about building usefulness in to their content. Simple things like taking a dictaphone to interviews so that you could have some audio to go on the site as well as good audio notes.  Everyone involved in journalism education should be stressing the value of digital as an addition to the process not as a replacement.

Paul’s posts make for a compelling and intelligent argument for everyone to take on board. Great, great stuff.