Well, that’s Ian Shapira’s suggested headline for a follow-up story on Gawker, after the site picked up on and heavily excerpted his story on ‘branding consultant’ Anne Loehr.
Gawker included a link to his original article – but only at the very bottom of the post.
Shapira’s initial happiness at having his story featured on Gawker turned to disillusion as he questioned the benefits of traffic driven by Gawker to his original piece, he writes in a follow-up piece.
Gawker may make money from advertising around its aggregation of original reporting from other sources, which have invested time and money into the report, but does a spike in traffic help the Washington Post’s bottom line, he asks.
“After talking with Denton [Nick Denton, Gawker founder], Nolan [Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker author] and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators – newspapers included – are more transparent about whom they’re heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture,” he writes.