How much is too much?

[Southwinds]

All too often anymore, there are plenty of stories that appear on the web sites of, well, let’s call them “reputable” news organizations that appear to outright pilfer another outlet’s work in the sake of having the headline and click and not missing out on the news.

One such example is the Dallas Mavericks’ Andrew Bogut addressing his departure from the Golden State Warriors, which appears right now as the No. 4 headline on ESPN.com.

In that story, Bogut says that the NBA is full of “two-faced” personalities and people who are “shallow,” which is certainly something that everyone knows is going to travel well in the headline and click landscape.

(USA Today – Andrew Bogut opens up about facing the Warriors)
(ESPN – Bogut: NBA full of 'shallow, two-faced' people)

One problem? Bogut made those comments in a Q&A with USA Today, which recorded 10 paragraphs worth of responses. The ESPN story takes five of those paragraphs for its story, and though it routinely attributed USA Today in the story (more than I’ve seen in similar instances, actually), it only linked to the USA Today piece as part of the first attribution.

Now, we know this is commonplace anymore, especially as the quest for page views drives every aspect of an Internet operation. These types of stories are all over the place, even at, as I said, “reputable” organizations (let alone the aggregators).

How much, though, is too much? At what point is ESPN plagiarizing the USA Today story? How much content is fair use? What kind of attribution should be required? Whatever happened to “Exclusives” and getting beat on a story? And, perhaps, at what point would USA Today have a compelling case to tell ESPN to take the story down?

(My thoughts: This story, even with the attribution and the link, is too much. If you’re taking half of the reporting of the original piece, you’re doing too much vulturing. I might set an arbitrary acceptable standard at 20 percent, and that even may be uncomfortable.)

 

[cjericho]

No espn writer has a byline. It says "ESPN.com news services."

 

[LongTimeListener]

This could be what Cuban's talking about.

Cuban revokes two media season credentials

 

[Southwinds]

Neither of those responses come anywhere close to addressing the situation I'm referring to, but good try, good effort.

EDIT: I'll elaborate, because rather than being flippant, I think each of you is missing the point.

One, it has nothing to do with the byline. It's about one organization taking the reporting and content of another organization.

Two, yes, while Cuban's point does refer to this, in a way, it's just a coincidence that I happened to be referring to an ESPN story in my example. There are a number of other websites, including USA Today, SI, The Washington Post, et al, that also do this.

 

[Old Time Hockey]

Curating and aggregating are the new plagerism.

 

[Alma]

ESPN took too much.

USA today should have called them on it.

Of course, maybe USA today does it too