It's called aggregation. It's when one news website links to a story from another news website, not just with a simple hyperlink but by copying and pasting entire paragraphs from the original article or, in extreme cases, rewriting the entire story with little or no attribution.

Critics have another word for this: plagiarism. They say aggregation sites are essentially stealing not just content but pageviews from competitor sites, and are getting away with it.


As former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller put it a few years back, too often aggregation "amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own website and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model."

And we're not just talking about obscure, fly-by-night websites but major players like Huffington Post, which has become famous - or rather, infamous - for its widespread use of aggregation.

To cite one example: AdAge columnist Simon Dumenco had one of his own stories aggregated by HuffPo. His response? A blistering column titled "What It's Like to Get Used and Abused by The Huffington Post."

Indeed, Huffington Post's reputation for appropriating content from other sites has become so well-known that The Onion.com did a brilliant spoof with the headline:

"Huffington Post Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine"

"Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine"

 

And Nasim Pedrad, portraying Arianna Huffington on “Saturday Night Live,” brays that “The New York Times has great coverage for this…and you can read all of it on the Huffington Post—because we copied it and pasted it.”

But news sites that are having their content used in this way aren't laughing, and some are even fighting back. For instance, a few years ago Sharon Waxman's site the Wrap sent a cease-and-desist letter to Newser CEO Patrick Spain demanding that he stop using the Wrap's content.

Waxman has said she doesn't have a problem with aggregators per se. Some, she says, send valuable traffic to her site.

But she alleged that Newser crossed the line by, in some cases, slapping its own bylines on stories that are little more than rewrites of her articles.

Waxman writes:

"All we really want is for Newser to stop pissing on our leg and tell us it's raining. Very simply: put in credit and links where they are missing. Add a Wrap homepage link to the source grid page. Make it simple and logical to get to actual Wrap content from that page... If Newser can't manage to do that, then it should stop using our content. "

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, has railed against aggregator news sites as well as search engines that aggregate news stories, saying that publishers should stop them from displaying full articles for free.

"We're going to stop people like Google, or Microsoft or whoever, from taking our stories for nothing," he said at a TV show taping. "We can do that, by using the law of copyright - and they recognize it."

Across the pond, the Daily Mail, which claims to have the most-viewed news site in the English-speaking world, has more than once been accused of walking on the wrong side of the aggregation-plagiarism divide.

Indeed, former Daily Mail writer James King penned a piece in Gawker headlined "My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online." In it, King wrote that “the Mail’s editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication."

The Daily Mail fired back, claiming that King was to blame, and that he "had to be repeatedly reminded about the need for proper attribution in his work."

It's not surprising that news sites are fed up. After all, profit margins in the news business are thinner than ever and no one's yet found the magic formula for monetizing web content.

And producing original content means employing reporters, which costs money. Aggregators reap the benefits of having original content, without spending anything to produce it.

As Willard Foxton put it in The New Statesman, "aggregators are parasites, only slightly more benign than plagiarists - and sooner or later, parasites kill the host.

"Someone has to actually create words for other people to steal," he adds. "It's just that actually paying for people to be creative is expensive. We'd better work out a way for journalistic creativity to pay - or we're going to have a much worse media in a very short time."

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