GOODY TWO SHOES: Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
The MSM continually whines – and sues – over bloggers “stealing” their content by linking to, excerpting or re-posting it, depriving them of traffic and revenue. But when Rolling Stone “lovingly commissioned, edited, fact-checked, printed and distributed” in hard copy its blockbuster profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his impolitic opinions of the pols and diplomats who regularly cross his path, Time.com and Politico couldn’t wait for the magazine to get around to posting the article online and threw a PDF of it up on their Web sites “for everyone to read without giving Rolling Stone a dime,” reports The New York Times:
It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket. …
Both companies said that a frenzy involving a significant national issue was under way and that because Rolling Stone itself did not post the article on its site, they took matters into their own hands. Each said that when Rolling Stone protested, it was taken down, and that when the magazine put up the piece at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, their sites linked to that instead. …
Several commentators suggested that Rolling Stone brought this on itself by not immediately publishing the McChrystal article on its own site (the magazine had planned to publish online but on its own schedule).
“That’s like saying, ‘She had it coming,’ ” Eric Bates, executive editor of Rolling Stone, said in an interview on Thursday. “The decision about when to publish our material is ours and ours alone. It was completely inappropriate.” …
Publishing a PDF of somebody else’s work is the exact opposite of fair use: these sites engaged in a replication of a static electronic document with no links to the publication that took the risk, commissioned the work and came up with a story that tilted the national conversation. The technical, legal term for what they did is, um, stealing.
Media organizations can file all the briefs they want about protecting their work product from free-riders and insurgent hordes of digital pilot fish, but once they break their own rules and start feeding on one another, the game is sort of over.
Given that 89 percent of journalists source stories from blogs (vs. 99 percent of bloggers who rely on MSM sources) and 65 percent of journalists use Facebook and LinkedIn for research, it should come as no surprise that bloggers find their scoops used without attribution by the MSM.
Earlier this month, Danny Sullivan painstakingly detailed how an article he wrote for Search Engine Land about a woman filing a lawsuit against Google after she was struck by a car on a highway while following its walking directions – and the accompanying illustration that he created – caromed around the Internet without a credit or link back to the original. To add insult to injury, the few news outlets that did include an attribution, credited PC World (which wrote its own article based on Sullivan’s research).
Sullivan explains the difference between how bloggers and traditional reporters source articles:
Though I’m a traditionally trained reporter, most of my journalism has been online, where documenting how a story has been found is both easily done (through links) and often done. Bloggers generally explain how they discovered a news item.
As a result, bloggers also set themselves up for accusations that they’ve just “ripped off” some traditional news outlet. By carefully listing an originating source, and sometimes a “via” source, they expose how news flows.
In contrast, a traditional media outlet typically does not document how a story came to life. It’s all a mystery. News just seems to emerge magically out of thin air in the middle of a newsroom. Or, it’s down to all those hard-working reporters out there defending democracy despite newspapers earning less these days because of all those rip-off bloggers. …
It’s not all a one way street, from traditional news outlets to blogs.
The thieving blogger vs. put-upon journalist meme comes full circle with DailyFinance's Jeff Bercovici taking New York Times investigative reporter James Risen to task for defending his Page 1 article about the U.S. discovering that Afghanistan is sitting on an estimated $1 billion in unmined mineral resources from online critics with this passé put-down: "Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas."
Bercovici notes:
Jokes about bloggers in pajamas were already a cliche by 2005, when a group of blogs banded together to form Pajamas Media. … Now it's 2010. Paul Krugman blogs. So does Hendrik Hertzberg. So does James Fallows. So does … well, everyone.
Bercovici thinks “[p]rofessional writers should come up with their own colorful put-downs rather than relying on tired, overused turns of phrase that aren't even particularly apt.”
And Sullivan thinks that “if the AP or traditional publications like the Salt Lake Tribune documented exactly how they ‘found’ news in the way blogs do, there’d be a fair reassessment of just how much flows back and forth.
For her part, The Stiletto thinks it’s time for her to get dressed and go to work (that is to say, to the remunerated activities she skillfully performs for her employer that end up as shortened links in other people’s Twitter feeds).
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