Where is the line between attribution and plagiarism?

This is something that's had my ears perked up for a while.

My former shop has been doing more and more of this with its one-person sports department, using quotes and information from another source, giving them one attribution and embedding a link to the original article.

They use their own byline and collect the page views, for someone else's leg work.

They did a ton of this with NBA Draft coverage, and am sure it's their wave of the future. Am I being too old-school, or is this dirty?

https://www.news-leader.com/story/s...g-career-ending-leg-injury-surgery/732820002/

 

One source and it's plagiarism; more than one, it's research.

 

It’s the norm nowadays.

Everyone aggregates each other.

 

Except that some rarely and minimally aggregate, while others massively and almost always aggregate.

Rule of thumb I most recently encountered was 2-4 grafs of, ahem, referenced content (with attribution and links) with 4-8+ grafs of original content/take. If you're not bringing at least that much to the table, I guess, you should just tweet out a link to the original stuff.

 

Take a look at NFL.com. The entire site is filled with stories like that, and it's garbage. The so-called writers sit behind a desk, never do any reporting, find stories online from NFL beat writers, take their quotes and write 10 inches on it. It's unofficial plagiarism. I emailed a couple of writers who regularly get their content stolen by NFL.com and they said "frustrating, but nothing we can do as long as they credit where the quote came from."

 

If your stories can be stolen with just a couple of quotes being taken, how valuable are your stories?

 

Quality is not valued by many news sources. They just want to slap a story together and put it up there.

If I go to X website and almost always see stories linking me back to the original elsewhere, why should I read reporting from X?

 

None of this is plagiarism. In the article you linked to, I don’t think it’s right to take that much information from the original source when aggregating, but it’s not plagiarism.

He’s not passing it off as his own. He credits the original publication—painfully—four times.

 

Also, I don’t know what the hell the aggregator is talking about here:

Magnum Moon finished in 19th place at the 144th running of the Kentucky Derby. Justify won the race with an unofficial time of 2:04.20.

There was nothing unofficial about it. That was the final time.

 

It's lazy, it's shitty, it's half-assed and it pisses me off. It's a direct reflection of our society and the next generation of millennial slobs.

Nobody wants to do the work, but they damn sure want the credit.

 

Because that's where you are, and that's what they are counting on -- that the reader won't bother to diffentiate between what's original and what's taken from somewhere else. Sad fact of the journalism world today.

 

I’d be surprised if they cared back then. One of the interesting lessons of the bottom falling out of journalism was that many things we thought people cared about, they just don’t.

I think back to coworkers explaining dry meeting stories were really more for print readers because that’s what they wanted. The writers really just wanted to validate not changing, which was painful.