COMMONS COURTESY:

The Post Vs. Gawker: When Does Linking Become Larceny? (James Poniewozik, August 3, 2009, TIME: Tuned In)

Washington Post writer Ian Shapira recently reported a feature on a business guru who consults executives on how to deal with twentysomething employees and clients. When Gawker wrote a snarky post based on (and linking to) his article, he was thrilled at first. Then, prodded by an editor, he looked more closely at the Gawker post and decided that, because it recapitulated his article so throughly, he had been "ripped off," which he then wrote in a commentary. [...]

Getting linked like that is not just flattering for journalists nowadays, it's necessary, and it's a good thing. Does that mean Gawker is in the clear here? Not on this particular post. Shapira's legitimate beef is that, while it sent traffic his way, it so thoroughly repeated his own reporting that it made reading the original all but beside the point.

The rules of how to do this kind of post are not set in stone, but in general, it's better to summarize an interesting article and refer readers to the original, or add some value to it with analysis or opinion or more information, and give explicit, clear credit.

Here are the rules we try to follow:

(1) No profanity.

(2) Minimal self-reference (though none would be unnatural)

(3) Minimal linking to other blogs.

(4) Minimal reference to comments. (Folks who write comments don't get
to do so on the front page, so we try not to write about them on the front.)

(5) Try--though I'm bad about this myself--to only quote about three
paragraphs, or no more than a third, of any story you blog. We want
folks to go read it at the site that owns it. But if you need to use
more to make the excerpt make sense, no problem.

(6) Always link to the original--we want folks to read the whole thing--and don't use links that pop up a new browser window. It's annoying for readers and if we aren't interesting enough for them to navigate back to us, that's our problem.

(7) Never let it interfere with real life.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 5, 2009 8:42 AM