You know a business by its people, and when I encountered Christopher Hogg, I knew Digital Journal was something special.
A couple days ago I put up a Rajbait at College Startup. It was entitled 15 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Didn’t Need College and I thought it was a rock solid article. Apparently, so did the cool kids over at Digg.
But much to my dismay, a search on the title of that linkbait turned up a citizen journalists article over at Digital Journal as the top result in Google. Even to this day, College Startup's original doesn't show up anywhere on the front page of the Google SERPS. I visited the article, and though College Startup was mentioned, the link was not directed back to my site.
Initially, as you might guess, this disappointed me. Though I was happy that the article was noticed, I was not happy that Google had identified DJ as the source. So, I contacted Digital Journal, not expecting a response (I rarely get responses from online publishers). Much to my surprise, an extremely pleasant Christopher Hogg responded with the following message:
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the note. This was written by a citizen journalist and I've taken a look at the post and there is mention of College-Startup with a link at the beginning saying the list was created by you.
We take these issues very seriously, so I have updated the link to the one you provided, as we want to ensure proper attribution is there.
If you take a look at the article now, does it reference you in a way that you feel gives proper credit?
Please let me know.
Best regards,
Chris
Because of this great response, I knew immediately that Digital Journal was a rare breed as far as Internet sites go. So I decided to ask Chris for an interview. Here it is: Read the rest of this entry
