Daring Fireball: On Attribution and Credit
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
First, as he notes, this happens a LOT (link, but not explicity attribution). And as he even notes, he does it himself -- and he does it regularly. The difference between him and Ina? Apparently, Ina's readers don't follow links (how does Gruber know that -- he doesn't). And as he notes, many sites do far worse -- no link, no attribution. But apparently this isn't about the crime so much as the criminal (allthingsd).
And of course he conveniently picks an Apple story to become self-righteous. I could have found hundreds of non-Apple stories over the past five years where this happened. But clearly none of them are important. Only Apple writers count?
He then goes on and claims that the correction was even wrong:
“Enthusiast site” is pejorative. Enthusiast implies that MacStories is produced by zealous hobbyists.
This is the oddest read of that term I've ever seen. When people say it is an "Apple enthusiast site", that means it is a site read by Apple enthusiasts. And MacStories is that. As is DaringFireball. Engadget is a gadget enthusiast site. Sports Illustrated is a magazine for sports enthusiasts. There's nothing pejorative about it. A "fanboi" site, sure that would be pejorative, but not this.
And Gruber, effectively put his attack dogs on Ina, and for what, for not explicitly calling out the name of this site. For a while her comments were filled with hateful attacks against her as a person, and many saying they had come from Gruber's site. They were removed, but they were the types of personal attacks you'd expect from a 1960s civil rights protest, but not because someone didn't add explicit attribution (because clearly running the story with a web link isn't enough).
One of his last lines is this, "Defensiveness is never flattering." Gruber should have considered starting with that line.
I'd like to hear what Mr. Viticci has to say about the whole thing. If nothing else, Gruber is certainly making that guy's name known.
Gruber also is right to make a distinction between writing that pretty much "consume(s) the story", and for that reason requires full attribution, as it will be read by many as a piece of text with no links, and his own teasers that give nothing away but a link to the real story, so attribution is less important.
His "order of preference" listing of how to give attribution is an object lesson in digital journalism. I have forwarded this piece to my friends who teach in J-schools.
The one thing the tech industry could do without are so many pointless Apple stories.
But if they do write Apple stories, they should recognise the people whose work they draw from as colleagues in journalism, not dismiss them as "enthusiasts".
I follow Gruber on RSS, and 90% of the feed items, clicking on the RSS header takes me directly to the attributed article. No landing page with ads or ability to mis-attribute the target.
Very few other feeds behave this way.
And it's really nice to see it called out. All of these blogs would be much more enjoyable to read if they weren't afraid of losing ad impressions by linking to something useful instead of a tag page or past fluff piece.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Robert J. Hanlon
For my part at least, I know I don't read Daring Fireball every workday in order to read about the minutiae of operating a high-traffic tech blog and the etiquette of attribution and linking.
(I read it for the high-grade industrial snark, of course!)