Seriously, what's up with bloggers wanting credit from old media?
Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#32Fear
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#33Probably the same thing issue that bloggers have with copying old media articles verbatim and then adding a modicum of "context". In their respective business models, things are done a certain way and they follow that model even if it conflicts with the model used by their source.
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#34Josh Linker, author of the Fast Company piece, responded in the comments: "Hi Chris. Josh Linkner here, the author of this piece @ Fast Company. I owe you a HUGE apology!! A friend of mine sent me that excerpt and I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's so I didn't attribute it when I wrote my post. As an author, VC, and entrepreneur I hold myself to the highest standards and I'm deeply sorry this happened. Will…
In addition to deserving that huge apology, Dixon deserves monetary compensation from Josh Linkner. Words don't write themselves, and so Linkner had to realize he was using someone else's work without permission -- even if he didn't know who authored the work he was plagiarizing. Linkner only cares because he was caught red-handed. If I was Dixon I would seek statutory damages without question.
Read the law: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#35Josh Linkner publicly admitted his mistake, offerend to talk it over with Chris, and even changed the text of the article, all within one hour. Dixon is being a little harsh, I think. http://www.philco.me/philcosblog/2012/4/6/apologizing-to-chr...
Nope, no way. Dixon wasn't harsh enough, because he thought it was just a lack of credit, whereas it was actually plagiarism. The reporter took writing that wasn't his that he played off as his own (under his byline, no quotes, no source). Completely unethical and irresponsible for a journalist to do that. The fact that he got in via an e-mail and thought he could just "use" it shows that this reporter has a lot to l…
Agreed. It was a public offense, and the theft of his IP. And really really lazy since a simple Internet search would have returned the article. A public callout is certainly not unwarranted. However I question what would have happened were he not Chris Dixon. He has a solid platform and the community respect to take on a writer for fast company. What about one of the rest of us?
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#36As a guy who runs a news site about a band that gives me exclusive news, I've been whining about this for a dozen years now. I've been ripped off by MTV, Spin, Rolling Stone, NME, Kerrang!, you name it. A friend of mine was at one point almost wholly responsible for the Wikipedia article on Nine Inch Nails, and related tales of seeing his writing in publications worldwide.
In my experience, I've seen things improve - at least in the realm of music news. I assume it's because music-related news outlets are hiring people who got their start blogging, and who have a better appreciation for citing and linking to your sources. I think it's going to take a while for this trend to seep into more 'serious' 'journalistic' organizations, but it's definitely getting better.
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#37Josh Linker, author of the Fast Company piece, responded in the comments: "Hi Chris. Josh Linkner here, the author of this piece @ Fast Company. I owe you a HUGE apology!! A friend of mine sent me that excerpt and I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's so I didn't attribute it when I wrote my post. As an author, VC, and entrepreneur I hold myself to the highest standards and I'm deeply sorry this happened. Will…
> I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's
So, who did he think wrote it? It had to be someone's.
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you didn't write it and don't cite a source, it's plagiarism. Doesn't matter if a friend sent it to you in email -- that just means you plagiarized a friend, which is kinda worse actually. It's really hard for me to see this as an "honest mistake"; it just seems more like your average, run-of-the-mill, laziness-induced plagiarism.
And in the age of Google, where you can just put quotes around the first sentence and find the original source, it shows a complete lack of care.
Once Google indexes Borges' Library of Babel, though, you will find that any sentence is already used, and every article is already written.
On a more serious note: it would be interesting to add a check to CMS systems to automatically look up all sentences in an article before submitting and apply information theory to compute a "plagiarism" coefficient. No doubt these kind of systems already exist to detect student plagiarism.
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#39I had a journalist rip off one of my posts without mentioning me as the source or even that I discovered the story. I found him on Twitter and sent him a message about it, and got no response. I dropped it because it happens so often.
I ended up following him on Twitter. He later published another story that was a slight follow up to my own story and series of articles. This article of his got a lot of attention. In an irony of all ironies, he then tweeted:
"This is why we need old media and journalists, bloggers would never have found or investigated this story" [1]
He had a bunch of other journalists replying in strong agreement.
He was talking about a story that was 90% built on posts that I and other bloggers wrote, and not only took the credit for it but claimed that there is no way non-professional journalists would be able to 'investigate' such a story. I pinged him again with 'oh the irony' and a link to my blog. No response again.
[1] Paraphrasing. He later deleted the tweet
Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?
#40Josh Linker, author of the Fast Company piece, responded in the comments: "Hi Chris. Josh Linkner here, the author of this piece @ Fast Company. I owe you a HUGE apology!! A friend of mine sent me that excerpt and I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's so I didn't attribute it when I wrote my post. As an author, VC, and entrepreneur I hold myself to the highest standards and I'm deeply sorry this happened. Will…
> I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's So, who did he think wrote it? It had to be someone's .
Would of being nice if he just apologized without the story about highest standards and a "friend".