Today our company’s CEO paid us a visit. To mark the occasion, we had a meeting to talk about how much content our paper should be putting online.
Our corporate owners have a policy about how much content we and the other papers should be putting online for free. I won’t give a number, but suffice to say, it’s not much. It’s also a loose policy, it seems, since our paper puts almost all of our content online.
The purpose of holding back content is, of course, to make the printed version more valuable. If customers can’t get the news anywhere else, they’ll be forced to buy the printed paper or pay for a subscription to our PDF-based electronic edition.
This strategy would work if we were the only source of news in our community. We are not. Read More
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the
The alpha and the omega
Plagiarism has come up as a subject of discussion again recently, leading some critics to ponder the reasons why journalists lie, cheat and steal, purposefully or “accidentally.”
Matthew Ingram tackles plagiarism from another point of view, saying that if journalists thought more like bloggers and truly valued hyperlinking, then they wouldn’t get themselves into such messes.
I especially like what Ingram has to say about how print journalists tend to see themselves:
There are all sorts of reasons why journalists do and don’t link. Web tradition says they should. Business sense suggests they shouldn’t. Whatever. Allowing yourself to “accidentally” include someone else’s words in your work without crediting them is the result of lazy journalists with poor notation skills. Period.