Using the ‘Steal-O-Meter’ to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote
Clipped Fresh — By Christopher Spencer on August 14, 2009 at 9:54 PMMediaShift . Using the ‘Steal-O-Meter’ to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote | PBS.
FROM THE ARTICLE: In the recent dust-up between the Washington Post and Gawker, Post reporter Ian Shapira was upset when his story was excerpted on the media gossip blog Gawker. While blogs and even mainstream news articles have been quoting, excerpting and summarizing other stories and blog posts for years, there’s never been accepted etiquette on how to do so.
COMMENT: I’m pleased to see that the folks over at MediaShift would call Ozarks Unbound’s Clipped Fresh an acceptable way to promote other stories, not a story thief.
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8 Comments
Nice clip. MediaShift is a must-read for anyone interested in these issues.
Fair use and giving proper credit are two sides of the same ethic. Is it too much to suggest that journalists have a responsibility to network the industry through aggressive citation and commentary?
I don’t think so, and I think that’s what has some professionals upset at or scared of so-called citizen journalism. Even though all of the old-hands read every news piece they can get their hands on, they don’t give credit and citation to the sources of their inspiration.
It’s one of the principal reasons the oldest media outlets (and their reincarnations) struggle to adapt to the 21st century reader.
Yeah, I love MediaShift. Started reading it when I was still in print and will say for the first time in several months, I felt really optimistic about journalism and storytelling. It gave me some new energy and interest in online journalism.
I don’t know that I agree about lack of listed sources, at least in newspapers. They tend to be fairly meticulous in naming their sources for information. Usually infoboxes have sources for their data also.
I think it’s fully legit to take a piece you read elsewhere and customize the issue with local reporting and context. Local TV news wouldn’t have a huge portion of their content if it wasn’t for the ‘National Issue Man on the Street’ interviews.
It would be nice if editorial writers and reporters were a little more transparent in where their ideas are coming from, but that’s not a common industry practice. Good journalists read constantly and take in news at frenetic pace. Sometimes it is hard to pinpoint the sequence of facts that led to a new story emerging. Might change though, as bloggers link back to their original inspiration sources more often.
That’s what I love about MediaShift, it often raises such awesome questions.
I think the wholesale content thieves are the ones who are by far the most vulnerable to copywright infringement.
I want to talk about proper citations not being an industry practice. More specifically, about what constitutes proper.
I think it’s proper to cite the source where you first learned of the story.
I think it’s proper to cite any sources that contributed “significantly” to your framing of the story, this includes interviewees, wires, other outlets, and potentially advisors.
But I’m not sure other than that…
Personally, as someone who acts as a source often in both of the above scenarios, sometimes I get cited and sometimes I don’t. Normally, I don’t care who gets the credit as long as things move towards the world I want, but it is nice to get the respect of a citation.
That this is not a common industry practice is very disturbing to me. I’m not alone. When most readers learn of the borderline plagiarism that results from failing to properly cite sources, they lose trust in the brand.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen with the mainstream media. (Actually, I hate that word, because more people use the Internet to consume information than any other medium, even in our own communities.
PS – You gotta get an avatar!
What we are getting at is when somebody tells a reporter that something is happening in the community and they should check it out, right?
Should the reporter then write into the story that this person alerted him to this and he checked it out?
If it’s just a tip, and the tipster doesn’t have a real reason for being quoted in the story, then no I don’t think the reporter would cite that person.
I think I might (if the tipster even wants their name associated with it) just because the style in web writing is looser. I have more room to play with than in print and I prefer to build goodwill and community from those willing to tell me about something.
But no, that’s not a common practice in print. Rarely in columns you see it.
Should it be? I don’t know – there’s a lot of Old School reporter practices that do need to be reevaluated to make the process clearer to the reader.
I think the philosophy on the web is to show the sausage being made, but generally in print you want the reader to get the sense that a story was homemade just for them by whoever has the byline.
You’ll note that at the bottom of many stories with larger state and national context there is a line called the “shirtail” in smaller print. This is usually the note at the end that credits the Associated Press or some other source for the Frankenstein story that is grafted together for those article.
P.S. I even tried to upload a gravatar today but was it came out all weird. I’ll try again later.
No, not just tips.
What if a journalist learns of a story from another outlet’s scoop? Example: a blogger references a newspaper article that scoops a police report and (hopefully) contributes a new perspective. Example 2: A talking head references a quote from another journalist or a politician.
What if a journalist conducts an interview to research the issue and that contributes significantly to the final story? Example: A journalist wants to write a story but is unsure of the angle or how it should be presented, so asks someone who is already involved in the discussion questions.
Then there are different levels of giving credit. Multiple authors on the byline, quotes in the text, embedded video interviews, and “so and so contributed to this article.” Few outlets are responsible enough to be so clear in how the article was formed.
Well in the legacy media world, each news agency operates generally as if none of the other agencies exist, at least publicly.
You might see from time to time, media partners – like The Morning News worked with 40/29 on an immigration package more than a year ago and the Demozette partners with TV from time to time as well – but generally the illusion is that each group operates in a vacuum.
So, if a reporter feels scooped by a another source on a story and decides to write about it, then that second story would never mention the original story from the other source. That’s ingrained in the culture.
Online it seems very different. That’s one prominent contrast between online versus legacy media cultures.
I don’t see that policy changing anytime soon. By publicly admitting that a newspaper was not the first one to break the story, and giving credit to a competitor, they feel it diminishes their prestige as the community’s definitive source of information.
I guess if an outlet is arrogant enough to think their reporting is “definitive,” then it’s just one more step to steal stories and ideas from wherever you can.
Is it ever right to be so ruthlessly competitive and underhanded?
Well, let’s step away from news for a second. One company introduces an innovation, like seatbelts or pizza in a cone or disposable razors. Other companies are going to copy that and not say, as a disclaimer, we got this idea from a competitor.
I see not naming your core inspiration for a story as lesser sin, if at all, of news agencies. Now, wholesale theft of content, such as the original post talks about … that’s bad news bears.