I am asked a lot of questions these days about the future of newsprint. Some folks who ask my opinion are convinced the medium is all but dead. Furthermore, many of them seem happy with what they consider to be the eventuality of it all and are just sure we will all be perfectly satisfied with online media resources. Others who engage me in the same type of discussion seem worried that the physical pleasure of reading a newspaper while enjoying a cup of coffee, tea or glass of wine, is in jeopardy. Another group seems concerned about the notion of revisionism when dealing with a strictly online version of “the news.” Not surprisingly, I join the ranks of the latter two groups. The idea of a world reliant on information delivered strictly online scares the heck out of me, and not just for my personal business reasons.
For those who think I am being old-fashioned or paranoid, I offer the following real-life situation:
One of our reporters, while recently doing some research online for contact resources for an upcoming story, found one of our articles posted on a website not affiliated in any way with the Signal Tribune. On that website, the article was posted verbatim with our reporter’s name removed, therefore leading any readers to assume that someone affiliated with the website was the composer of the featured article.
Adding insult to injury, the person in charge of that website wrote a summary abstract of said article where he/she uses rather inflammatory words regarding councilmembers mentioned in that article, making it look as though the original article contained the same name-calling text.
It wouldn’t take a genius to Google the article, find our writer’s name (besides our print version of the paper, we post our articles on our website) and assume that we were not only associated with the offensive website, but were in agreement with the wording of their summary. Revisionism, indeed— not to mention plagiarism and theft of copyright and/or intellectual property.
Believe me, we will do our best to do something about this absurdity as soon as possible. However, moving forward, how do we stop this from happening again? How do we know it hasn’t happened before? At this time, I have no answers to those questions— my own questions.
So, my point, and I do have one, is when newspapers publish articles, good or bad, the publishers, editors and reporters can be held accountable. Once information is disseminated online, is there any accountability for those who do the postings? I think not.
