August 17, 2010 11:44 PM UTC

How Is This Not MUCH Worse Than What Blogs Are Doing?

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• by: Colorado Pols

We debated about whether we should even bring this subject up again, but we think the questions that came to mind when we first saw this story yesterday in The Denver Post worth the discussion.

As many of you know, Colorado Pols was issued a “cease & desist” order by the Post and more than a dozen other local newspapers based on their claim that we were excerpting too much of their copy and thus depriving them of revenue somehow. We responded by pointing out that we didn’t need anyone else’s reporting in order to thrive as a blog, but we also made the point of, er, pointing out that we have always gone out of our way to not only provide a link for a particular reference, but also the name of the publication and the reporter who wrote it. We didn’t have to do any of these things — we could have just summarized the story in our own way, which is what many outlets (like the AP) do on a regular basis. But we’ve always believed that providing an excerpt, along with a link and a name, is really the most proper way to handle this so that the original reporter gets the full credit he or she deserves.

Yesterday we linked to Jody Strogoff’s story in The Colorado Statesman about how some major Republican business leaders were supporting Democrat John Hickenlooper for Governor. The Statesman story was dated Aug. 13, so we were a few days behind in catching it and mentioning it here on Colorado Pols.

At about 7:00 p.m. last night, The Denver Post put up a story (which we won’t excerpt, since we are legally barred from doing so) with the exact same information that was reported by Strogoff. We’re absolutely not suggesting any sort of plagiarism — nothing of the sort — but we found it odd that there was no mention whatsoever that The Statesman had first reported this several days earlier.

The Post story is written as though their reporter was the first person to find out about this. Maybe that’s true — maybe the Post reporter had no idea that the Statesman had already written about this and that Colorado Pols had already mentioned that the Statesman had already written about it. But we doubt it; more than likely, this is just the same time-honored practice of news organizations reporting what other news organizations report, only by re-writing it differently and adding a few new pieces themselves.

We think it’s better to do what many blogs have done for years — to provide an excerpt with a link and the name of the publication for full credit — rather than to not provide any excerpt, or any sort of hat-tip, and to just report the story as though it were completely your own.

This was one of the things that really stuck in our craw when we received that fun “cease and desist” letter. Newspapers and other news outlets regularly cannibalize the work of others, and apparently that’s okay. But if a blog actually gives full credit to a news outlet and doesn’t just re-phrase the copy, then somehow a major sin has been committed.

Frankly, the entire newspaper industry might have a better chance of surviving if they would just start treating their fellow newspapers with some respect.