A throwaway line in a story about an actual plagiarism case:
But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend—or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.
Wow. Just … wow. Talk about a boneheaded statement in an otherwise excellent piece about how a pattern of plagiarism was tolerated at an alt-weekly. Far be it from me to defend fucking Drudge, but since when is linking to someone’s work, thereby explicitly GIVING CREDIT PUBLICLY to the original source, on par with stealing someone’s words and using them as your own? Seriously, am I alone in not seeing those two things as the same at all?
Come the hell on here. This kind of thing was cute in 2004, referring to bloggers as remoras or whatever it was Kurt Andersen called us, but it’s 20effing08, can we please find a new target for all our convenient outrage and mockery? Bagging on bloggers is starting to seem about as comedically risky as opining that Bill Clinton likes, on occasion, to sample the intern pool.
Not for nothing, but if Rosen is looking for the Napster of newspapers, all he really needs to do is turn on the local news in any municipality in this country. I’ll feel bad about throwing him a link when he goes after Action News Beaverton 3000 for doing rip-and-read.
Schmuck.
Via, as credit is due, Romenesko.
A.