Arianna Huffington’s Web site, the Huffington Post, has ignited a controversy that raises some intriguing questions for those of us who toil in the print media and online.
Specifically, it shines a very bright spotlight on the practice of “aggregation,” in which an online concern links to an existing story, maybe offering a few words of its own on the subject in an attempt to make it appear fresher.
This is nothing new—the very concept of blogging is pretty much built around it. Just go to any blog you enjoy on a regular basis, and you’ll find someone opining—either briefly, with a few bad jokes thrown in, or at length—on a story or development that was first reported on somewhere else. Lots of folks who use Twitter engage in the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale (140 characters or less, to be exact).
There’s also nothing inherently immoral about this practice, as long as you’re acknowledging your source material in some way.
This is where the controversy comes in. A Chicago Reader staffer angrily posted yesterday that the Huffington Post lifted an entire blurb—about an indie-rock musician, of all things—from its site without crediting the source. This has prompted some angry responses. The Reader’s Whet Moser fired off this shot: “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.”
My favorite is from Kevin Allman, Editor of New Orleans’ Gambit Weekly, who in an open letter to Ms. Huffington says, among other things: “Even the most rapacious of outsourcers pay the poor sods who actually make their own salaries possible, even if it’s just a pittance. But they don’t have the stones to call themselves ‘progressive’ and then go on Jon Stewart.”
Part of what’s at issue here is the gray area between aggregation and outright theft—and let’s be clear, as someone whose words are his livelihood, I’m against someone profiting from my work if they haven’t paid for it. And if you’re going to reference my work, at the very least I’d damn well better receive the credit.
But this episode also raises what is, to me, a larger, thornier question about aggregation’s place as a journalistic practice. And more to the point, a question about the proper use of another’s intellectual property.
Full disclosure here: The Sunday Paper regularly prints Arianna Huffington’s syndicated opinion column. And not to get too inside-baseball on you here, but things have been a little tense lately between SP and Creative Loafing, Inc. (which owns the Chicago Reader), in part because our publisher, Patrick Best, has taken CL’s owner, Ben Eason, to task for stating that he sees the compilation of stories from other sources as a cornerstone of CL’s content model in the future, not just online but in print as well.
With all that out of the way, I’m neither defending the Huffington Post nor taking potshots at another publication. I’m married to a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property, and for years I’ve made my living off of such content, so the issue hits a little close to home for me. Again, aggregation is fine as an online practice, whether you’re doing it in your basement in your free time or generating content for the satellite blog of a print publication. (Although in the latter case, such aggregation should be, at best, a supplement to original content, and never a substitute for it.)
The thing is, the Internet is a beast that feeds largely on itself, like the mythical ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tale, forming a circle with no beginning and no end. The Huffington Post is a great example of this: It presents itself as a gateway of sorts to other content. But because it sells advertising, it appears to be profiting off of the intellectual property of others (in the Chicago Reader’s case), without compensating the producers of that content for their work.
There’s no gray area there. It’s just wrong.