LwC, couldn’t resist the comparison. I’ll always and forever groove on the underdogs in media.
And I will grant that wholesale, egregious copy-paste of entire stories is simple theft. But I’m not sure to what extent that takes place.
In my experience, bloggers, by and large, want to advance an argument using existing news content as a trigger. It’s implicitly recognized that a portion of content is all you need to bolster a point — followed by a LINK to the source of the original find.
To that end, most bloggers with any credibility at all DON’T simply foist off entire pieces. I, for one, ignore such sites. I want to know WHY a blogger finds something relevant — quickly — and then I check their links.
This is the kind of stuff that should be labeled “Well, DUH.” Ignorant bloggers are winnowed out by the credibility filter fairly quickly, in my opinion. I think it’s very sad we have to set up “standards” to winnow out the weasels.
