Don't Get All Huffy About the Huffington Post

As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web's journalistic "parasites"—blogs, aggregators, Google—on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement. The Associated Press has threatened legal action against thieves of its intellectual property, MediaNews executive (and AP Chairman) Dean Singleton has seconded that threat, and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the top editor of News Corp.'s Wall Street Journal, growl in harmony.

Their fury against the Web is not isolated. Pinch any journalist (print, Web, or broadcast) who creates what he considers original copy, and he's likely to regale you with the stories of how his publication's product has been stolen or otherwise misappropriated by a Web site. More often than not, the wronged will point his finger at the Huffington Post, the self-styled "Internet newspaper" launched by Arianna Huffington in 2005. When not accusing the Huff Post of outright theft, these angry writers and editors will seethe about how the site routinely abuses the "fair-use doctrine" by milking the essence out of other publications by lifting the salient paragraphs out of their stories.
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Here's an example of the Huffington Post technique. To the aggrieved, it doesn't matter that the Huffington Post supplies a "Read the whole story here" link at the bottom of the lifted paragraph. It doesn't matter that attribution for the paragraph can be found if you know where to look for it on the cluttered page. They'll bluster that the damn page looks like original-to-Huffington Post copy, and they're pissed about being ripped off.

Just try to talk them down with the observation that Huff Post reporters Sam Stein, Ryan Grim, Jason Linkins, and Thomas B. Edsall do lots of original journalism on the site, and that the site pays for its Associated Press content, and that hundreds of bloggers submit their work directly to the site. You'll get nowhere.