In my post on the Chicago Journalism Town Hall, I said that no less than John Callaway said the act of blogging/aggregating could be called “theft” in some cases. I’m not of the same mind in most cases, but I also acknowledge that there doesn’t seem to be an acceptable set of standards for crediting one site or another with a story (more often than not that results in shitty reporting, not theft, per se). And as WBEZ’s Justin Kaufmann points out, the problem gets even worse with national sites that syndicate content from local providers.
Kaufmann’s beef has to do with this story from NBCChicago.com about the Hard Working series from WBEZ. Or rather, what MSNBC did with the story NBC-5 wrote.
Compare those two links and you’ll see they’re the exact same story, but the MSNBC version is stripped of any referring links to WBEZ’s story. This problem goes beyond the whole “good neighbor policy” of giving credit via links back to original content, and actually robs the MSNBC version of the story of its worth. The end of the piece says:
Her story is not so very different from the other 1,499,000 unemployed people in the Upper Midwest. They just want to work. [Listen to her story ... or read more ...]
Except the MSNBC version doesn’t link off of “Listen to her story” or “Read more.” It’s just text, unlike the NBC Chicago version. So the MSNBC reader is left to guess as to how Carole Cantrell’s story is “not so very different.” Any news value the MSNBC story had is gone.
At the Journalism Town Hall, Callaway and others were concerned with writers getting credit (or payment) for the work they do. It’s funny that none of us even thought to consider how a lack of adopted best practices on the Web would hurt readers, too.
Incidentally, WBEZ’s Hard Working series is definitely worth checking out in its entirety.
Lest any of your readers get the wrong idea:
All local media affiliates have content-sharing agreements with their parent companies. All local Hearst papers, for instance, share their stories with the parent company, which then distributes those to their other holdings. Likewise, all local network affiliates share their stories with the network, and thus the network’s other outlets.
The fact that MSNBC used this story at all is not the issue. The only problem is a formatting oversight. Treating that as if it were intentional plagiarism is ridiculous.
No one’s calling this plagiarism. It’s about the way you credit the original source of a story via links (which is lacking in the MSNBC version) and the value in the NBC-5 story being lost due to the “formatting oversight.” Since the NBC 5 story’s purpose was to direct its readers to solid content elsewhere, the MSNBC story had no utility at all.