Media stories of note for Wednesday, March 27, 2013:

Roy Peter Clark, a veteran news executive, has written an extensive essay arguing that we criminalize practices that are not plagiarism. He has a long list on non-sins that he believes are misconstrued as plagiarism: self-quoting, grabbing a turn of phrase, inadequate paraphrasing, patch writing, boilerplate descriptions, among them. Poynter.org has posted his provocative piece and prefaced it by noting the views are Clark's and not those of the Poynter.

Daniel Victor, a social media editor at The New York Times, has written a critique of the Twitter hashtag for Nieman Journalism Lab. He decries them as aesthetically disruptive and heavily overused. Moreover, they can bias search results because those who have used them repeatedly often get to the top of the query result. He thinks they're useful to gather small communities of interest but ought to be used less often for more obvious content.

Politico executive editor Jim VendeHei has posted a video in which he wonders about the future of non-partisan media. He believes Politico is trying to find a way to keep such media financed, but he also believes the future of non-partisan media "is in doubt."
 
 

Politico, the adept online news operation based in Washington, has worked through a reverse-syndication deal with Reuters to provide newspapers with its content.
Additionally, Reuters will provide 10 stories and 10 photos daily to the Politico network, launched in September with dozens of newspaper and online clients.
In exchange for the Politico file, newspapers entering into the agreement share revenue for page views of the Politico content online.
Likely there are several deals of this nature in the offing as online news organizations attempt to grow and legacy media look for more affordable alternatives to full-fledged wires. In this case, the link with Reuters is interesting in that it provides an entree to international markets that Politico couldn't have reached on its own.

 
 

It'll be worth paying attention to the impact of Politico's offer to provide news content free to sites (and their papers) that, in turn, share online revenue from its national advertising.
This is the first major example of how a new economic model is emerging in syndication and services. Rather than subscribe to a service and sell advertising on your own, the service's content and advertising are provided and the outlet receives the editorial material free and a share of the ad revenue attached to that content.
In the U.S., a handful of news outlets are serving notice of displeasure with The Associated Press (the Newark Star-Ledger has started to publish without AP content, even though it's still in the cooperative, while a handful of other dailies have said they intend to leave when their contracts expire).
It will bear watching whether this move into a link economy will serve as a win-win.
Full disclosure: Our chain left The Canadian Press a year ago and redirected those funds into an enlarged Canwest News Service. Other international services, offset our loss of The AP, which has an exclusive contract with CP in Canada.

 

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