Live data from Hacker News

Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

cdixon.org

41–50 of 58 posts

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#42
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

PR 101. Just apologize, as simply as your lawyer will let you. Don't complicate the issue, or netizens will dissect everything you say, which just drags the crisis out.

A journo should know better.

The problem is, people try to justify themselves. Real sleaze-balls probably don't care, but normal people (who may have screwed up a bit) always try to blame someone else. I would. It's bad PR though.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The software should already be there, I've seen it mentioned many times over the years.

If one of those software producers would provide an API (something similar to Automattic's Akismet for spam) I'm sure there's money to be made in selling that service outside the academic realm.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#44

As 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 -…

Your friend (or you, not sure if you mean your friend is complaining) understands that once he writes content into a Wikipedia article he agrees to give away the contents of his work to the public right? That's the whole point of Wikipedia. Your friend doesn't deserve credit, Wikipedia does.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#45
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, my university uses a service called Turnitin to rate the percentage of coursework that is plagiarised, along with giving where from etc.

It's pretty nice actually, can recognise when things are quoted and not passed off as your own.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good point! Specifically, reputable journalistic outfits should implement a policy of running their materials through TurnItIn before publishing. This would allow editorial control over plagiarism. Any journalists want to comment on whether or not this is existing policy and why?

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#47
One of the most egregious "old media disrespects new media" stories I've seen was last year when The Daily Mirror lifted a complete blog entry by comedian Dave Gorman and printed it in the paper. They did give him credit, but never asked permission or paid him for his work. (He decided not to take action against them for it, but it seemed that was mostly because he thought it was pointless to go up against their legal team.)

http://gormano.blogspot.com/2011/12/ctrl-c-ctrl-v.html

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#48
post #14
post #9

"Old Media"!? It was launched in November 1995. To many thats old, but to most I would think thats not "Old Media" in the usual sense of the word.

The "Old" refers to the medium of distribution. I have no idea what "Fast Company" is, but according to wikipedia it's a printed magazine.

In that case, "Traditional Media" might be a better term.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#49
post #44

As 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 -…

Your friend (or you, not sure if you mean your friend is complaining) understands that once he writes content into a Wikipedia article he agrees to give away the contents of his work to the public right? That's the whole point of Wikipedia. Your friend doesn't deserve credit, Wikipedia does.

Of course he does. I think it would be quite a task to bring a Wikipedia Article up to "featured article" status and not understand such a basic fact about Wikipedia. I suppose my inclusion of that bit was more about the oddity of seeing things you wrote, copied verbatim into hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and online articles. I think that when we discussed this, his point was also that Wikipedia was not credited.

The web was built for referential text. It's one of the basic concepts of "Hypertext" - that it's 2012 and so-called journalists fail to use this simple process to give credit where it's due is kind of sad.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#50
This happened to me too. I posted an article on my blog and it got on HN's front page. It was about how people have to stop sending .doc files as attachments via email and to use something like .pdf instead. (my article is here: http://maxmackie.github.com/2012/03/19/Stop-distributing-.do...)

A couple days later, this guy wrote about the same exact thing, bringing up the same exact arguments as I did (his link: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/03/the-magi...).

He posted about a week after me. I didn't really do anything about it, but he could have at least mentioned where he got the idea/information. Incompetence.

Post reply on HN