Big news at the Huffington Post with a $1.75m investment in investigative reporting signalling the continued expansion of blogs beyond linking and comment, but some are also wondering if this is at all connected to the thorny issue of content scraping and possible legal action?Content scraping is where blogs take an excerpt, usually not toooo much, and link to the original post, but some blogs have recently been accused of whole sale content theft. That's taking not just the odd paragraph, but the the whole article. The Huffington Post is one of those blogs in the firing line.MinnPost.com for one thinks the $1.75m fund for investigative reporting is window dressing for a site that could be sued for "oversharing others' work". Oversharing is such a polite way of putting it. You have to wonder how much investigative reporting these ten people will do when some are freelancers and their job description will include short breaking news stories as well as longer pieces?The alternative weekly the Chicago Reader was one of several papers to recently complain about the Huffington Post's practice of "oversharing"."The Huffington Post's local 'aggregation wing straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice--they didn't ask permission ('read the whole article'? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here's a screen shot since we're obviously about to ask them to take it down."Film critic Roger Ebert was also a little hacked off with the Huffington Post and vocalised his discontent beneath the offending article:"I would like to point out that this article rips off my actual article about the incident at rogerebert.com, and by adding all those 'he saids,' destroys the rhythm and form of my prose. Nor does the article even have the decency to link to mine, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to see that HuffPost stole it from me. Nor does it even say where I 'said' these things, but implies I said them to HuffPost. Arriana, I love ya, but this practice is immoral, and HuffPost practices it shamelessly."Arriana Huffington said in the press release about the investigative fund that it would provide "work and a platform for seasoned journalists downsized by major media outlets", which is all well and good, but Gawker wonders how much experience these people will have in a post headlined 'Arianna Huffington Seeks Young Flunkies' where it reprinted a job ad for a managing editor, which is looking for two years experience in online news and a degree.
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Gordon Macmillan
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