The postmodern plagiarist pushes journalism into a corner

By David DesRoches

Image (c) itfipvirtual.net

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea.”

– Comte de Lautréamont, 1870

This controversial quote sends chills into the spines of journalists who have been plagiarized. Most of us take ownership of the work our hands and minds create, if not legally, at least intellectually. But proponents of de Lautréamont's mantra might consider his acumen insightful. One person in particular, postmodern activist Guy Debord, was so enamored with this concept that he actually plagiarized the exact phrase, in French, in his 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle.

In the art world, stealing is often considered a form of flattery. For centuries, originality was shunned as art and literature were judged on how well the creator imitated the masters. But things changed as western societies entered the Romantic period, and an individual’s right to ownership of a creative or literary work became a value to rival society’s right to common property.

Aggregation tests traditional notions of sourcing and accountability

 By David DesRoches

 “A thousand bloggers all talking to each other doesn’t get you a report from a war zone. Somebody’s got to take a real risk... [and] gather that news originally.”

- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,

in Page One documentary

Media blogger Jim Romenesko gained a Twitter following of more than 45,000 people (and growing) by being a maverick paraphraser — a sensei in the art of finding interesting news and distilling it to its essence. His success germinated while working at the Poynter Institute where he helped pioneer an aggregation style that now permeates the web. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of hits to other websites, giving them free advertising through his enticing summaries.

           

In late 2011, Romenesko’s aggregation techniques became the subject of hot debate and derision when his boss, Julie Moos, posted a blog that challenged his practices and claimed his attributions were incomplete. She provided examples where Romenesko failed to include quotation marks around certain phrases within his aggregated story.

Business Insider story advises Patch to "keep scraping content"

A former Patch salesman advised the company to keep scraping content, ostensibly because "cheap content is king."

Nate Carter, I am glad you have high hopes for the future of local news. But tell me, why should an editorial department listen to a salesperson about content generation? I'm sure you have an intelligent perspective, but the mingling of news with sales in any way is exactly where journalism should not be going.

But this is beside the point. Consider Mr. Carter's grand homage to Huffington Post's (over) aggregation techniques:

Keep scraping content. This should be done at HQ. Have 4 or 5 low-level staffers at Patch HQ who just content scrape from around the nation. We all hate it, but see point #2. This could be managed with simple Google News alerts and a copy and paste technique. If they perform well they could be promoted to the Huffington Post.

Does this only scare me? How could anyone talk so blatantly about plagiarism as if it were normal? (The #2 he referred to mentioned a heavier load for the local editors, so I'm guessing that scraping would help them hit their story quota. I almost think this entire post is sarcasm...)

Aggregation can be a great story supplement, and smart aggregators such as Jim Romenesko offer a valuable service for content creators. But over-aggregators such as the Huffington Post straddle an ethical line and in some cases cross that line and leave it in a dust-filled distance. 

Sometimes over-aggregation could be copyright infringement. It's not fair use if an aggregation provides enough content to prevent a person from visiting the site where the original story was published, as this post by AdAge's Simon Dumenco illustrates.

Some of Mr. Carter's suggestions to make Patch more efficient make sense. Patch should cut its editorial staff, but the suggestion to employ freelancers to cover beats is already happening, at least at some Patch sites. 

The bottom line is we should all be appalled that content scraping is being suggested. What happens when we scrape the scrape of a scrape? When does it end?