Need advice…

I’m building a news site. Each post will consist of a link to something external to my site plus a bit of description.
I want the post title — rather than being a permalink to the article on my site — to be the link to the external site.
For example, if I’m reporting an article published on CNN, I’d want the title to point to the CNN article and not be a permalink to the post on my site.
So…given that I know little about PHP, here’s what I’ve done.
In index.php, in the “post” div, I’ve replaced the line…
<h3 class="storytitle" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></h3>

…with…
<h3 class="storytitle" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">"><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
When I write my article, I enter the title as something like…
Article headline
This does seem to do what I want, but I’d like to get the opinion of people who know more about PHP.
Is this the simplest way to achieve the result I’ve described? Am I doing anything foolish here?
Many thanks!
M.
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Michael O’Henly