I rarely read The Huffington Post. I’m not a subscriber to any of its feeds and I only read it when a headline somewhere else catches my interest and I click the headline to read the story. Usually, it’s because a story somewhere else references The Huffington Post and credits it with a link.
Something else you should know about me is that I’m a former newspaper editor, an award-winning one. Three of my many awards are consecutive Stephen Philbin Awards for Excellence In Legal Journalism awarded by the Dallas Bar Association. I’m not just some idiot with access to a keyboard. Not that any of that really matters.
The issue here is: What is fair payment for a story copied from a source online to be used for another source online? I’m asking because The Huffington Post is itself making the news with allegations of content theft.
As a writer and publisher of content myself, I’m well aware of the issues surrounding content theft and am very sensitive to them. Here are the facts as I know them about this situation:
- The Huffington Post copied a 146-word story verbatim and in full from Chicago Reader
- The Huffington Post changed its headline from Chicago Reader’s original
- The new headline was linked to Chicago Reader’s story
- The Chicago Reader page carrying the story is a PageRank 0
- The Huffington Post page carrying the story is a PageRank 4
- If you copy and paste the first sentence of the story - not the headline - and paste it into the Google search box you’ll find The Huffington Post’s story at the No. 1 position; the Chicago Reader story isn’t even on Page 1
- Copy and paste the first sentence in Yahoo!s search box and you’ll find The Huffington Post at No. 1 and Chicago Reader at No. 3
In my opinion, Chicago Reader journalists are blowing smoke in the wrong direction. They should be on the backs of the search engines about their issue, not The Huffington Post. Google has a duplicate content policy that allegedly maintains the original story will be the one indexed, not the copied or duplicate one. In that case then, Google isn’t following its own policy. Yahoo! has a similar policy. While Yahoo! may not be treating Chicago Reader perfectly fair in this instance, it is at least doing a better job than Google.
But there’s more to this than meets the eye, obviously. In search engine terms, a link is payment. Whenever one website links to another website, that’s a vote of confidence. At least, that’s the way the search engines see it. In other words, the hyperlinked headline from The Huffington Post’s page to Chicago Reader’s page is a form of payment for the former’s use of the content. While linking to a story from a headline is a little bit slick and less noticeable to a reader than a link at the end of an article, it’s still a link. It still counts the same in terms of search engine benefits.
But is that enough of a payment? We’d have to ask ourselves whether there would be any form of compensation had the same instance happened offline, in print. If the two online publications were both print publications and The Huffington Post “borrowed” an entire story from Chicago Reader, would there be any associated benefit assuming all the other facts were the same? And the answer to that question, of course, is no. That would be a clear instance of plagiarism.
Online, the rules are different. Plagiarism occurs when a source attempts to take credit for a story. The Huffington Post clearly isn’t doing that as evidenced by the linked headline. That doesn’t mean the editors of The Huffington Post are absolved of any guilt whatsoever. They could have done two things differently:
- Only used part of the Chicago Reader story rather than all of it
- Linked to the original story at the end of the borrowed content
If The Huffington Post had done both of those things, would Chicago Reader journalists be as concerned? I don’t know; maybe. But what they should really be concerned about is search engine listings. They should write to both the Google and Yahoo! teams and point out that their publication is the originator of that story and would appreciate being listed at the top of the search results for any content found within the article. If the search engines don’t know there’s a problem, they can’t fix it.
If you go to this story in The Huffington Post, you’ll find that they’ve already made the proper adjustments. You can see Chicago Reader’s original story here.
Whet Moser, a Chicago Reader editor, obviously doesn’t understand search engine optimization. If he did, he wouldn’t be accusing The Huffington Post of being a scammer. Here’s what he should have done instead of writing his silly impetuous editorial:
- Written The Huffington Post editors and requested that only a part of his story be used instead of all of it
- Sent a letter to both Google and Yahoo! asking for a higher position in the search rankings for key terms within the article
That’s it. Simple. Administrative action usually is all that is required in most cases like this, but it seems that Moser would rather have had bucked up to a perceive bully. This, to me, looks like a case of a writer who is too married to his cheap and worthless words.
