I read something today that got me thinking. Believe it or not it was this article about Mischa Barton getting hospitalized because or a reaction to medication that I read on Yahoo! News.
It got me thinking about how information spreads between new news sources like blogs and old offline news sources.
Here is how my thinking went:
Who is Mischa Barton? Oh, some lady on some TV show that I don’t watch.
How did this get on Yahoo! News? Ah, the Yahoo! News article is really a Reuters article that Yahoo! posted. That’s a very old school, newspaper way of purchasing content.
How did Reuters learn about this and why is there so little information? They read TMZ.com. The Reuters article says:
Actress Mischa Barton, former star of the hit television series “The O.C.,” was taken to a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a reaction to medication, the celebrity news Web site TMZ.com reported on Monday.
Why didn’t Reuters link to the original article? Reuters clearly read the original TMZ article since they quote directly from it for most of their article. Would it have killed them to link to the original article on TMZ.com? I came up with two answers for that.
Reuters is used for offline newspaper articles and dropping a link into offline print is awkward at best.
Reuters does not want to be associated with a celebrity gossip site of the likes of TMZ.com. At the time of this writing, the Recent Posts listed under the Mischa Barton article are:
Not exactly Pulitzer stuff, but if Reuters is going to get their celebrity news from the more entertaining news sources, they should embrace them…or at least link to them.
I’m of the opinion that if you are going to quote an online source for distribution to other online sources, than you should link to the source. This is the internet after all. Let me go read what was really said.
Maybe Reuters should offer versions of their articles with links for online distributors to use and without links for offline. Or maybe they should just give up the offline version without links all together. After all, aren’t newspapers dying?
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I have a big problem with this trend — echoing content from one site in another site without linking to the source.
The fact that Reuters is doing it makes things even worse. Many people will assume that if Reuters is doing it, it’s OKAY to do it. It isn’t. Taking someone else’s content, either word for word or paraphrasing in depth, without giving credit where credit is due is both lazy and a violation of copyright laws.
And is this story really news?
If definitely made me chuckle to see Reuters, TMZ.com and celebrity gossip all in the same article. I gave up trying to figure out what was “news” some time ago.
I guess you can never trust everything you read anymore. It is interesting how these sites get their news, and I agree completely that if you are going to use content from another site, you better link to that site. It is very unprofessional indeed.
I really don’t get the not linking to the sites they mention in the article. Isn’t that what the internet is all about is linking to stuff to make it easy for people to find more information about what they are talking about?