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



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I am appalled at the leftist media and a couple of those on the right. How anyone can mock and use the tragedies of other people to have fun and/or boost their blog traffic is simply beyond me. A young couple have decided not to marry. They could change their minds. It is none of our business.

The stress they have been through makes this understandable. The media's constant interference even cost Levi Johnson his job. And I don't care if he didn't have his GED. That could have been remedied quickly. We have seen a parade of unqualified people fill highly paid federal and state positions and most continued to do so by fulfilling the requirement. This was just one young man taking on burdens far beyond his years.

This topic is so "hands off". I would feel the same if Bristol was Barack Obama's daughter or Hillary's. In fact I detested the tacky things said about 12 year old Chelsie. BTW, she has grown into a beautiful young woman.

One blogger told me Bristol and Tripp are fair game because Sarah Palin made them so when she threw them into the limelight.

Of course this makes no sense. Young and fragile helpless mothers and babies are never "fair game" and I really appreciate this blogger who is not a Palin supporter saying so.

Is Bristol Palin fair game?

March 13, 2:26 PM · 1 comment

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17 year old Bristol palin and son AP Photo/Fox News

It seems to be a little distasteful when the left leaning media, or the wacky left bloggers decide to attack a candidate’s family. Granted there are whacked out loons on the right who do the same thing, but are politicians family members really fair game? Is it ok to attack a 17 year old girl who is already going through an extremely difficult situation?

This is in the news right now since it became known this week that Bristol Palin, daughter of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, has broken up with her boyfriend and father of her baby.

Regardless of where one sits on the Sarah Palin issue, I for one happen to be on the fence, I feel attacking someone’s family is pretty classless. While I don’t really know how I feel about Palin, I do know that the McCain campaign made a huge mistake in picking her, and the proof of that is they got creamed in the election last fall.

Not knowing or not realizing what a publicity storm a teenage pregnancy was going to do to the campaign is the final mistake that sink the McCain ship. However I don’t think it is fair to continually attack Palin’s daughter.

I found this article from last September that kind of coincides with my thoughts on this. It is not ok to attack family members, attack the candidate all you want they asked for it by running but leave family members, especially the children out of it.

http://www.examiner.com/x-2601-Detroit-Conservative-Examiner~y2009m3d13-Is-Bristol-Palin-fair-game

© Janet Crain

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Sarah to Katie "You're not the center of everyone's Universe."

© Janet Crain

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Media Will Just Have to Suck it Up and Wait

Angst on PBS Over Too-Long Wait for Obama's Inauguration
In the midst of a discussion about President-elect Barack Obama's national security team, Washington Week host Gwen Ifill on Friday night's program sought confirmation for her theory that "what people are beginning to say is that this President-elect should be President now" as "people are saying why isn't Barack Obama leading the fight about the auto-makers?" New York Times reporter Peter Baker agreed: "That's right, exactly." He proceeded to fret over how "people voted for change and this strange, odd 77-day waiting period that we impose...between our election and our inauguration" just isn't compatible with the "hyperactive 24/7 fast-moving culture that we have today." Baker admired how "Obama is trying to find some balance between respecting President Bush," whom Baker conceded is "still in charge," and "finding a way to assert leadership."

Rather: Biggest Crisis Since Pearl Harbor, So Inaugurate Sooner
Appearing on Friday's Morning Joe on MSNBC, former CBS anchor Dan Rather chided President Bush for not doing enough during his lame duck period and argued for moving Inauguration Day up to December 1. And although Rather didn't explain specifically what Bush wasn't doing enough about (The financial crisis? The terrorist incident in India?), he did hyperbolically fret: "But, we're in possibly, possibly the biggest crisis we've been in since December 7, 1941 and maybe since the time of the Civil War." Addressing the past practice of inaugurating presidents in March, Rather lobbied: "Thank heaven, we now swear them in, new Presidents, in January. I'd be in favor of moving it up to December 1st."

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'Disgusting' Bias for Obama, Time Writer Admits

Sunday, November 23, 2008 5:40 PM

The mainstream media's support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign was so biased that even major insiders are now admitting they were shocked by its depth and depravity.

Last week, Time magazine's Mark Halperin called the media's performance during the campaign simply "disgusting."

Halperin told a panel of media analysts at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election, "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war."

He added, "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

According to the Web site Politico, Halperin, who edits Time's political site "The Page," zeroed in on two New York Times articles near the end of the campaign that profiled both Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama.

"The story about Cindy McCain was vicious," Halperin said. "It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."

But the Times gave Michelle Obama red carpet treatment, "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is."

Halperin, a former ABC News political director, allowed that some of the press coverage simply reflected the extreme efficiency of Obama's presidential campaign.

"You do have to take into account the fact that this was a remarkable candidacy," Halperin said. "There were a lot of good stories. He was new."

Obama also had a lot of money and outspent Republican John McCain by more than 2 to 1.

The press never bothered to hold Obama accountable for reneging on his promise to use public financing. McCain kept his promise to do so.

During the campaign, conservatives criticized the pro-Obama coverage, but it had little effect.

Columnist David Limbaugh noted: "Never has that been clearer than in the 2008 presidential election, during which they are covering up rather than covering Barack Obama's shady past and alliances, his knee-deep involvement in corrupt practices threatening the very core of our democratic system, and his many policy misrepresentations."

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/media_bias_halperin/2008/11/23/154417.html?s=al&promo_code=71E0-1


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