p2pnet news | P2P:- Way back in the middle ages, when I was a very junior reporter on a small newspaper in England, apart from writing obituaries and weddings, I had to go through other local newspapers looking for stories we’d missed, or stories we could follow-up. The editor and seniors would scan through the list and if they saw something they liked, it’d get assigned and end up as fresh copy, and when I moved on to larger publications, it was the same.

Sometimes a story would be so unique we’d quote from the source directly, clearly saying where it came from.

As I said, that was a long time ago and I don’t know if things have remained the same, but I still follow much the same procedure here on p2pnet. I have a long list of sites I check out first thing in the morning and fair dues, if I refer directly to a given story or stories, I always mention the sources with a link in the text, first time around, and then several other times, depending on the length.

In addition, the headline to the original story, plus a direct link back, is always included at the bottom of my post.

Quite a  few p2pnet stories are lifted whole and re-published elsewhere. Sometimes the people who are re-running them say where they got them, and sometimes they don’t. But since most of the time I’m simply trying to pass information on, that’s cool and I don’t lose sleep over it.

But it is bloody annoying when the on- and offline biggies pick up originals without any reference back, and the story shows with AP or Reuters, or whatever, cited.

Fair dues, as I said earlier,

‘They’ve done this before’

What prompted this was Another Classic Rip-Off Job By Ars Technica from Matthew Glenn Siegler (right) on ParisLemon.

“Ars Technica is really good at stealing other’s ideas,” says Siegler, going on, “Anyone else, and I may have given them a pass that they came up with what seems to be the exact same approach to a story that I took last week.”

But not Ars Technica, he says, because, “They’ve done this before. To many people. Many times. I’m hardly the only one who has noticed it.”

As he sums it up >>>

Ars sees a news story. They sit back for a few days and let everyone else weigh in. They take the best of those ideas and craft a post out of it. The stories often look well-crafted because of this. Many of them hit the frontpage of Digg (this one probably will too) [not only but also, they also land on Slashdot - Jon].

They wake up on third and everyone assumes they got a triple.

I’ve tried in the past to go about calling them out in a nicer way, but that time is over. I’m sure they’ll try to claim they didn’t see my story. Whatever. If this was just one or two or 12 incidents maybe I would buy that. I’m not buying it now.

Ars Technica is bullshit.

But the real issue, Siegler adds, is, “Ars sitting around and waiting for other sites to write stories, then publishing their own a few days later with the very same ideas. Yes, they may link to the originator of the news (from what I hear they’ve been told many times to do so and have gotten better at it), but they are very often not linking to those whose ideas about that news they take for their own. Some of you seem to want to let them off the hook just because you see the presence of a hyperlink in their story.”

So?

So Siegler is correct, and Ars isn’t the only site that’s guilty.

Credit where it’s due

As far as I’m concerned, there’s a substantial difference between following something up and developing a fresh post, and simply waiting a while (and, often, not a long while, either) and then re-formatting someone’s else’s material, knowing because you are who who are, your story will show up on Digg, or Slashdot, or even in the New York Times, just as though it was yours originally.

Offline, it’s cut-throat and scoops are where it’s at —- beating rival publications to the punch. But, again IMHO, things are very different on the Net where stories live on in a way they don’t do offline. Here, I sometimes see items I posted months ago show up on Reddit, or stumbledupon, or similar sites.

So —- credit where it’s due, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a huge, famous site, or a blogger just starting out online.

By all means, follow up and develop something fresh and new from a story you see posted somewhere else. But if you merely re-frame it a bit, do say where it came from, even if it is days later. You don’t need have everyone believe you’re so smart all your stories are brand spanking new, and you’ll be better off for it.

Respect is is usually mutual and it’s highly unlikely you’ll lose readers by clearly saying where your ideas came from.

Since ParisLemon sparked this off, back in February I quoted it, together with three other sources, in Is Apple getting set to launch an iGames console?

As I write this, the post has been read 3,422 times.

That’s probably peanuts to the Ars Technicas of the world, and I don’t know how many visitors the average ParisLemon attracts, but to me, it’s not bad.

And I didn’t have to pretend I was the only game in town to achieve it:)

Cheers! And all the best …

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:46 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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