Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics?
Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook.
Was that not also plagiarism?
The original r/AskReddit thread ("What feels illegal, but isn't?"): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aszfh3/what_feel...
The Buzzfeed repurposing of that thread ("19 Things That FEEL Illegal Even Though They Definitely Aren't"): https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/if-you-have-a-guilty...
And a r/mildlyinfuriating thread about Buzzfeed's repurposing ("Buzzfeed blatantly copying their articles from AskReddit threads"): https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/axb6cw/b...
As the r/mildlyinfuriating discussion points out, the Buzzfeed article is both prefaced with the origin — i.e. "This week, a Reddit thread asked users that very question..." — and a link to that source. And each item (i.e. Reddit comment) is attributed to the Reddit user (e.g. "Walking out of the store without buying anything." —lassissal), and a link back to the user comment. Plagiarism is the act of claiming authorship for someone else's content. Buzzfeed's profit-by-curation may be distasteful, but it's not plagiarism.
In any case, I think the average person understands that Buzzfeed is an aggregator, with a mission to get clicks and to entertain. Stealing content is wrong no matter what, but it isn't a direct contradiction of Buzzfeed's purported core purpose. Snopes' purported core purpose is to "have the real facts", and that purpose is directly undermined by lying about others' work being your own.
If I were to publish an article that is a word for word copy of another article, with proper attribution, would I not be accused of plagiarism?
I think the lawyers of the NYT may have a different opinion about that.
The fact is, Buzzfeed was able to get away with stealing content from reddit and selling ads on it because no reddit user was ever going to hire a lawyer to sue them over it.
Also, I've certainly seen Buzzfeed content that was taken from Reddit without attribution.
It's explicitly not stealing content.
I would even call it stealing content. But plagiarism is about passing someone else's work off as yours.
But also, when you post content to Reddit, you've granted them a (non-exclusive) license to reproduce it as they please. If Reddit's okay with Buzzfeed's reprinting, then I don't think it would legally been seen as stealing either.
In any case, your objection seems to be that plagiarism and repurposing of content (legal or not) fulfills the same evil end: profit from the labor of others. Sure, I'm not necessarily arguing against that. But I'm pointing out there's an additional element to plagiarism, which is the implication of independent, original reporting. To use a screenshot from the investigative article, which shows the Reuters and the Snopes version of a Supreme Court ruling:
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2021-08/13/0...
By restating Reuters' assertions without attribution, Snopes implicitly implies that it has done the independent reporting and research (e.g. calling up the attorneys, downloading and reading the court docket). And the apparent "fact" that this Kentucky court clerk is denying licenses based on her religious beliefs becomes significantly more established "fact" when two different journalism outlets have independently confirmed it.
Snopes ostensible speciality is gathering and summarizing established facts, which includes filtering through the noise of fakery and also, redundant information. Committing plagiarism is not just immoral, but a direct attack on Snopes' reason for existence, and that what makes this situation especially notable beyond "Doesn't everyone do growth hacks?"
i) the typical buzzfeed junk - Buzzfeed - This group follows no journalism practices, steals content from other sites, doesn't attribute, writes click bait articles, rebrands ads as articles, etc.
ii) the investigate journalism department - Buzzfeed News - this team has top notch investigative journalism. They actually do tons of original research, interview and cite sources, break big stories (many of the Uber scandals were found through their original research). Basically this group follows journalism standards and actually is at the top tier of investigative journalism.
The irony is that i) and ii) are run under the same brand and the only reason why Buzzfeed can fund investigate journalism ii) is due to the b.s. content they serve from i).
it's a weird scenario where the org is both the worst and best of journalism. Bu at least they have found a sustainable, albeit sleazy, way of funding investigative journalism.
Citing where you took the words from doesn't make you the author of those words.
I wouldn't even have a problem if Buzzfeed had just slightly rewrote the content from reddit. Because that would involve some effort. I wouldn't even care about attribution in that case.
But doing a full copy-paste, hitting publish and then collecting money for it is just disgusting.
BuzzfeedNews is legitimate journalism, financed with the money from the clickbaity Buzzfeed.
But I agree the co-branding has its downsides.
Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10 other news sites within a day.
This legwork is usually done by traditionally respected publications (i.e. not just copying and pasting). Other outlets and blogs with different goals do blatantly copy and paste, which produces articles less valuable than those traditionally matched.
Matching—versus copying and pasting—is important because it avoids the spread of false reports. From "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: "Originality is a bulwark of better journalism, deeper understanding, and more accurate reporting. […] In the era before curation and aggregation, the tradition of “matching” stories was rooted in the same idea. Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first. This tradition of matching was a way for news organizations to avoid having to credit their rivals, which in this earlier era was considered an embarrassing admission of being scooped. Yet the tradition of matching had another more important and salutary effect. Stories that couldn’t be independently confirmed would not be repeated."
A norm in the journalism industry is to credit the first publication who reported an investigative scoop, naming the outlet (e.g. this New York Times article [0] cites information reported by less-read Punchbowl News).
That is the high-quality, professional version of matching. The low-quality, unprofessional version is echoing a story for clicks, but you're less likely to run into this if you are a newspaper subscriber who reads reports from publication apps (or alternatively, a reader who curates high-quality sources of reporting without paywalls).
But let's not kid ourselves that this is only online. It happens in all news media. One person breaks a story then all the other news outlets just repeat the original story sometimes with their own followup quotes.