"... Is the thinking that it's safer for individual organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and tinyurl's of the world ..."

"... Is the thinking that it's safer for individual organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and tinyurl's of the world ..." If you have your own url shortening you can: - infer from the logs - you also have a definitive mapping of urls from short to long A third party might be cost efficient in the short term but link rot on short url's at some time will be a problem. For a news organisation, the value of inference from logs (who, source, time) could be worth the cost. For a news organisation, authenticity as @jackowayed points out is a big plus. I've often wondered why google didn't take over the shortening market a long time ago.