You’ve been blogged: money for nothing and content for free

The Washington Post has a good natured piece that is well worth a read on the liberties blogs take when swiping other people’s content as they distil hours and sometimes days of work into as little 30 minutes.

In his piece ‘The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)’, Ian Shapira writes about his recent Washington Post piece about a life coach explaining Generation Y to Gens Xers and boomers (‘Guru Explains Gens X, Y, Boomer To One Another’), which was taken by Gawker.

He explains that despite his long interview with the coach, his 3,000 words of notes and 1,500 word finished piece he was flattered to have Gawker blog and link to his piece.

But then having spoke to his boss he slowly realised that he’d been had. Or more precisely, he’d been blogged.

“Gawker’s story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr’s biography — information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered. But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where’s your outrage, man?

“The more I toggled between my editor’s e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it — the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others — but lately they’re making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) (pension plan) and health insurance.

It is easy to understand why his editor might have taken that view. Gawker took extensive quotes and as with everything in blogosphere it took it for free.

Shapira goes on to say that he spoke to the Gawker blogger (who spent 30 minutes blogging the WaPo piece) and finally how he spoke to Gawker boss Nick Denton, who, smart guy that he is, knew just how the reporter felt and that he too felt the pain of people taking his content, saying he would “love to shut down or charge” the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint Gawker’s stories.

Oh yeah, but as for that WaPo piece in particular? “That was certainly more of an excerpt than we’d normally indulge in,” Denton said.

I thought about calling this blog post “How I spent hours writing this feature and all I got were a few lazy blog posts” because that seems to highlight the core idea in this debate about the worth of content. The Washington Post invested resources, time and money in that piece. Gawker did little, but scored traffic and income on the back of it.

It’s a big debate, some want to stop blogs taking so much for free. Its outcome will impact on the future of newspapers and play a role in any plans they have to charge for content.

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