Romenesko and Poynter

I love the job offer at the end of Jim's personal recollection.

 

The main lessons seem to be:

-- Accusing Romenesko of failing to attribute is like accusing Reader's Digest of stealing. The entire point of the enterprise was to digest, to summarize. Whether that was done with quote marks or not, with paraphrases or not, that's all it ever was. It can't be theft. It was linked to the original. It served to point us to the original.

-- Poynter's editor was spooked by the possibility of having a negative story done by CJR.

-- Poynter's editor (intentionally) missed the point of CJR's questions, which had more to do with Poynter's recent redesign (her redesign) making the posts longer, and making the links to the original work much harder to find. She threw Jim under the bus for her changes.

-- It sure was convenient that he was leaving to start another site, though a different site (no more aggregation, but only his original work), and she was upset that he'd be taking some of her advertisers.

-- Her note read like a parody of Poynterspeak. All ethical rules, no journalism experience.

-- Poynter's claim that it didn't accuse him of plagiarism is bunk. She said he violated the rules, then quoted the rule against plagiarism.

-- He'll be better off elsewhere.

-- It took me two days to break my habit of going to Poynter about half a dozen times a day.

 

An old SJ friend made his way into infamy (again) in the comments to that post:

http://jimromenesko.com/2011/11/18/my-bizarre-departure-from-poynter/#comment-48

 

Boy, there's a blast from the past. He commented on my (long unupdated) blog, too, several times. Professional grump, in the sense that there's a set of (his) rules, and there's never a gray area, and that's that.

I guess it's a simple way to live life, though, completely black and white.

 

The only "problem" and potential source of confusion came when Poynter started having him link his tweets and such to Poynter instead of to the original article.

It was annoying, and only designed to draw page views.

But, that wasn't Romenesko's fault or doing. That's on Poynter.

The way they've handled this is a disgrace.

 

Poynter = pointless.

 

I'm sure Poynter is pleased that he attributed and sourced everything with that post.

 

I just got the annual Poynter fund-raising solicitation in the mail today. Gee, so it can go toward such worthy causes as Julie Moos' salary? Sign me up!

 

Sorry I'm not on that list. I'd tear it up, return it in the stamped, addressed envelope, with a note delineating those who needs to be removed from the Poynter payroll.

 

LTL, I think I know what you should get Ben for Secret Santa!

 

Agree with this. Seems like she is making a mountain out of a mole hill, and even that may be overdoing it.

 

It's ironic that an organization that should be lauded and prove inspirational to journalists is almost always villified and scorned.

They should buy some mirrors over at Poynter so some of the honchos could take a long look in them.