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Later Aggregator
There’s no doubt. Our world of shared media and endless distribution outlets – oh, internet, you bane and blessing – forces all of us to continually shift our weight in a struggle to find the right equilibrium. We want to share. We don’t want to steal. It used to be that only professional journalists had to wrestle with these issues. Now, we’re all in it together.
Witness what’s been happening in the last couple of days over at the Huffington Post. Ad Age’s “MediaGuy”, Simon Dumenco, wrote an article, alleging and decrying the Huffington Post’s practice of helping themselves to other writers’ content, all in the name of “aggregation”. Specifically, Dumenco cites the use of material from one of his earlier AdAge articles which magically found it’s way - somewhat reworked – onto HuffPo‘s pages. Apparently, HuffPo responded with an indefinite suspension of the writer in question. In turn, Dumenco now says HuffPo missed the point – it wasn’t just one writer being irresponsible. Dumenco maintains that, in fact, that writer was simply following long-established practices that are at the very core of HuffPo’s way of doing business. He asserts that the methods in question flow from the top, with accountability resting on the shoulders of HuffPo Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Arianna Huffington.
Personally, I’m a longstanding HuffPo fan. I don’t always agree with their individual stances, but I have enjoyed the site as a convenient one-stop for news and opinion. With no direct insight on Dumenco’s allegations, and no knowledge of the Huffington’s Post’s actual established practices, I would simply guess that some protocols will be reassessed, if nothing else than for the sake of good PR. However, I do think this incident serves to cast light on a broader ethical issue that affects us all: Are we in the blogging community acting responsibly as pass-throughs for the works of others? What, exactly, are the new rules for sharing, attribution, and aggregation? I’m sure upcoming classes of media and communications students will sit through lengthy dissertations on the subject. As for the rest of us, it looks like some may have to learn the hard way.
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Author: Gary Grant
As Senior Creative Producer / Director at Mindclay, Gary's crazy-quilt background includes on-air investigative reporting, program production, product development, creative team leadership, distance education, instructional design, B2B + B2C media, and a bizarre host of seemingly unrelated experiences that power the creative reactor as needed.
5 Comments to “Later Aggregator”
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Interesting post, Gary!
As a blogger who enjoys finding cool material, and passing it along, I may be a guilty party as well. Food for thought, for sure!
This topic is particularly important in an age where so much material is available on the internet and there is a whole generation of kids who do not understand the idea that not everything on the internet is free.
One of the most exciting and important things the internet does is allow ideas to be shared, but in this commercial world we live in, bloggers that repost others materials without attribution (and sometimes even with attribution) can be robbing the owners of that content of the income that could be generated by someone going to the owner's site.
At the magazine that I used to work for, we had entire articles lifted from our site (mostly with attribution by admirers), but by posting the whole article instead of using a tease and/or a link to the original content, the blog sites were robbing us of "clicks" that would have boosted our page views and thus potential advertising revenues. Most times it was innocent, but in one case, the blogger had a competing print publication that was using his online page views as a means to boost his print ad sales. The site was entirely blog posts that lifted content from various publications. The author was not generating any new content, but was using content owned and created by others to sell advertising for himself.
It's a whole new digital world out there…
Gary,
Great post and I could not agree more with Susan.
I have even been asked on more than one occasion to, "Here scan this article in and post on the web". It's amazing what people try and get away with.
Needless to say, I guess we all keep doing our best to up-hold the laws.
Thanks.
P.S. No I did not post the scanned articles.
Agreed, Susan, it's a quandary, to be sure. I just hope we can all do a better job in restraining ourselves so the litigators don't have to come in and do it for us. It would be a shame to see too much "lock down" on all the great content floating around out there! And Rank, good to know you didn't give in to the dark side! ;-)
appprove