June 15, 2004
Remember that time you published something in a tiny backwater newspaper -- some outfit calling itself the "New York Times"?-- and suddenly two paragraphs of your story appeared, nearly word for word, but with other different bits inserted, in a Red Eye wire service piece under the Chicago Tribune's copyright? Is that that what-do-you-call-it thingey that the kids learn about in journalism school? Libel? No wait, that's the other bad thingey. Plagiarism? Is that it? Or are there just not enough words to go around anymore? Maybe there's some sort of profit sharing venture between the papers? I know times (no pun intended) are tough in newspaperland, and I really do sympathize. For the record, Red Eye might like to know that I usually don't work for less than 5 cents a word.
Fascinating information: Red Eye is a subscriber to NYT news services, which gives them the right, obviously, to reprint stories. What they do that's unusual, however, is sort of mush chunks of those stories together with other news service stories. And then, to acknowledge that these stories are a composite, instead of giving multiple credits to the different sources, they actually remove all credits. Gotcha...
And of course, this now touches on a MUCH more interesting topic -- the homogenization of American newspapers. Wire services, feeds, reprints: less and less original reporting is mimeographed farther and thinner across thousands of identical local newspapers. Sure, the argument has always been to devote in-house resources locally, and use wire to supplement. Newspapers would like to make some money, it seems, which is fair -- and subscribing to news services is cheaper than paying some schmoe 34K a year. In the end, small papers might lose the most, as the papers become less reflective of their region.
But anyway.
They'll Always Have Paris [NYT]
Paris and Nicole are back at it in 'Simple Life 2' [Chi Trib]
