Huffing and Puffing and Scamming the Search Engines

The humor site The Onion, the offbeat weekly The Chicago Reader, and Time Out Chicago have discovered that some of their articles have appeared in total on Arianna Huffington’s mega web outlet The Huffington Post. And they are none too happy about the wholesale lifting of their material, either.

http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/12/21/huffington-post-stealing-others-writing/

The Huffington Post, a venture-capital-backed new media site that mixes links to other sites content with hundreds of celebrity and volunteer blogger posts, is being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content.

Whet Moser, an editor at alternata]ive weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post's newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago.

Compare for example, the Chicago Reader's Amanda Palmer review and The Huffington Post's (screenshots if the pages change: Reader, The Huffington Post)

Moser writes:

You want to do a post that says, "According to Jessica Hopper, Bon Iver rules, check 'em out, go here for the info," fine. But taking an entire concert preview is bush league. Doing it as a practice is just beneath contempt. If the future of journalism--which everyone keeps telling me The Huffington Post represents — is a bunch of search-engine optimization scams, we have bigger problems than Sam Zell's bad investment strategies.

But The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti says the contretemps are overblown — that the complete re-printing was a mistaken editorial call and that The Huffington Post's intention in aggregating other publications' content is to send traffic their way.

"You tease, you pull out a piece of it, and then you have a headline or link out," Peretti said. "Generally publishers are psyched to have a link."

He compares The Huffington Post's influence on other sites traffic to that of link-voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Those sites, along with Google News and Slashdot, rely on small excerpts or user submitted summaries of online content in order to create lists of the best new content on the web.

But none of those aggregation sites, including Google News, uses as much of a percentage of copyrighted content as The Huffington Post does.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/huffpo-slammed.html

Is this right? Is the Huffington Post simply the future of journalism? Is Journalism Ethics dead? Click here to comment:
http://sarah-palin-2012.blogspot.com/2009/04/huffing-and-puffing-and-scamming-search.html#comments



Click here to view all recent Sarah Palin in 2012 posts

Sarah Palin: A digital superstar

“People are projecting their values onto Sarah Palin, and in some sense, she reflects them back,” said Mark Corallo, a Republican media strategist. “She’s a conservative, she’s young, and she’s attractive. She speaks to something that’s been missing from the Republican Party.”


By CHARLES MAHTESIAN 11/29/08 6:51 AM EST

Three weeks after the Republican ticket suffered a sweeping defeat at the polls, Sarah Palin continues to dominate search engine queries, cable news and online video sites. The only American politician who generates comparable interest is President-elect Barack Obama. No one else is close. Palin was the most popular Lycos search from the week she joined the ticket continuously through last Sunday, some two weeks after the election, when she was dethroned by Paris Hilton, the celebutante whom John McCain famously compared to Barack Obama. The Alaska governor now ranks fourth, just one spot below Obama, on the weekly Lycos 50 list.

“People are still searching for her in record numbers,” said Kathy O’Reilly, a spokeswoman for Lycos. “How bizarre is that? Obama is the president-elect after the most historic election of all time and you’d think he would be dominating search activity and he only now is going ahead of her.”

Palin has been the subject of intense online fascination since her introduction as the Republican nominee on August 29. In September, the Anchorage Daily News reported a 928 percent spike in traffic, according to Nielsen Online. Her mid-October Saturday Night Live appearance drove the show’s highest rating in 14 years, and her Oct. 2 debate with Joe Biden was the most watched vice-presidential debate ever — drawing more viewers than any of the three presidential debates between McCain and Obama.

The scope of the GOP ticket’s loss — and the role her critics assigned to her in that defeat — hasn't cooled interest in Palin. She ranked as the number two top news search at Ask.com this week, number two (after Obama) among newsmakers on the AOL 2008 year-end hottest searches list, and she occupied two slots on Politico’s list of the site's 10 most searched terms. Palin also ranked fourth among Yahoo searches, behind “Black Friday,” a famous Czech model and a contestant on the hit television show "Dancing with the Stars." She was the only politician on the Yahoo top 20 list.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/16047.html

Click here to view all recent Sarah Palin in 2012 posts