“Investigative journalism may have pride of place within the mythology of American news, but that’s not really what journalists have been up to, by and large.”
They put the U in UGC: BuzzFeed builds a Community vertical as a talent incubator nie.mn/Z7NelM 
Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO czar, passed along his answer to that question. The newspaper was selling links:
In Google’s world, we take paid links that pass PageRank as seriously as Amazon would take paid reviews without disclosure or as your newspaper would treat a reporter who was paid to link to a website in an article without disclosing the payment.
A good reminder of the danger of those “Partner Links” sections you sometimes still see on news sites: Once Google finds out about them, you can enter a world of pain.
What to read next
May 22, 2013
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