March 2nd, 2009
News scraping: Are bloggers doing more harm than good?
There was a piece in today’s New York Times that really hit close to home for me. It took a deeper look at “scraping,” the practice of grabbing content from the Web and re-posting it, with proper attribution, in blogs.
It’s a common practice among bloggers, myself included, and one that I’d be willing to defend, given my history of working as both a newspaper reporter and blogger.
As a newspaper reporter, it was not uncommon for me to spend a whole day chasing down a story that had already been written by the competition, just as the competition chased mine from time to time. As a blogger, I see those sorts of efforts as a waste of time - why would I chase down the same source to say the same thing when his words are already on the Internet? If there’s a news outlet or blog out there that has already done the leg work - and done it well, mind you - and it’s a topic of interest for my readers, why not just share it and move on to the next piece of news?
Of course, I’m not just going to steal the text of that story and pass it on as my own. I’ll tell you about the news at-hand, what was reported and do my best to give you a bit more insight as it relates to other topics of interest regularly posted on this blog. I’ll provide a link to that other story and, through an excerpt, offer you a “peek” at what you’ll be reading when you go there - if you choose to do so.
That last point is actually the sticking point among content providers, according to the NYT story: (Watch out. Here comes a scrape but I gave them a second link.) The Times writes:
Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information. But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content. With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.
Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, tells the NYT that news organizations are increasingly unwilling to “accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in” and think they need to be more aggressive about protecting their original content. (That was both a paraphrase and a scrape, by the way.)
In some ways, the news outlets have a point. If the link from a blogger doesn’t lead to a click, then the news outlet has basically allowed a blog (which did get the click) to gain from someone else’s work. But, it’s not like the blog post kept the reader from reading the original piece. For all I know, the readers of my blog might have never seen that original piece and, therefore, wouldn’t have clicked on it anyway. Through a link and excerpt, the blogger has now exposed that story to a larger pool of readers and has actually extended some credibility points to the original source.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the news business is under such pressure to keep readers for advertising purposes that links are inadequate and excerpts do more harm than good. So I turn to you - the readers of blogs - to offer your two cents on this topic. Are excerpts and links a form of poaching or stealing? Or are they valuable tidbits of information that provide interested readers with even more information?
Feel free to participate in the poll and/or chime in, via the Talkbacks.
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Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/02/09
