Has Local Media Used Your News Without Giving Credit?
by Matt on Jun 8, 2010 in Blogging
I’ve seen some rumblings on various hyperlocal blogs, and in the Twitter accounts of various hyperlocal bloggers, about their local newspaper or TV station reporting news that was originally reported on the hyperlocal blog … but without giving the blog credit.
Does that sound familiar to any readers? If so, you may want to read this piece from Danny Sullivan last week:
How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit.
Danny is the founder/editor of Search Engine Land (where I’m the Assignment Editor), and he details how traditional media all over the world used a story he broke on SEL without giving any credit — and how he managed to get some of them to cite SEL after the fact.
And yes, hyperlocal bloggers/journalists should certainly credit traditional media sources, too. It’s a two-way street.
Has anything like this happened to you? How did you handle it? Comments are open, so tell your story so we can all learn for if/when it happens to us, too.
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What happened to Sullivan sucks, but sadly, it happens to all of us. Recently on my blog, I recommended the following:
(1) Use original images to eliminate any doubt of who owns the copyright.
(2) Keep a tight grip on source documents, instead of posting them in a public place.
(3) When someone rips you off, blog the hell out of it.
Here’s my question for all of you at this blog.
Is there a distinction between “local news” and “hyperlocal news” beyond the “hyperlocal” people not being paid?
I write and edit a website about new media journalism stuff and none of the users of this word seem to be able to delineate why it is a useful term.
Please help me.
Tom, if you write and edit a “website about new media journalism,” I’m a little alarmed you don’t know the answer. But at least you’re asking.
“Hyperlocal” is INSANELY misused these days.
It is supposed to mean “so local we’re talking about a neighborhood, maybe even a single city block, something relatively small.” Of course even that can be subjective – the “neighborhood” where we do the news has about 70,000 people, which if it didn’t happen to be attached to the rest of a giant city, could be a nicely sized city all its own. (And once was.)
But now it’s being thrown around in reference to entire MAJOR cities – example, “Big Media Business X is going hyperlocal! They now have a San Diego site, a Seattle site, a Los Angeles site …”
That’s not hyperlocal, it’s just plain local. Although as with many misused words (like “blog”) you can avoid the situation by getting as specific as you can get: “Business X is now doing city sites.” “Business X is now doing neighborhood sites.” Etc.
P.S. Hyperlocal people DO get paid. We are in the black, and we’re far from alone. However, my last “local” job, as the #2 manager at a TV station, was in the service of a major media corporation that had declared bankruptcy. Finances here in entrepreneursville = better!
I didn’t mean that nobody using that word gets paid, it was just a flippant remark. I just meant that the word has no clear delineation to me outside being a buzzword.
You’re saying that “hyperlocal” is about a city block? Why is that not just “local”? What’s the contrast? Also, news about a specific street? Really?
Don’t be “alarmed”. It’s not that I don’t run into the term 600 times a day. I just never get why it exists. I’m going to start running a series about the notion this week.
This is a topic our community has discussed at some length in recent months, so you might be interested in reading these old posts and the comments:
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/how-do-you-define-hyperlocal/
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/defining-hyperlocal/
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/lost-remote-tries-defining-hyperlocal/
I agree with TR that it’s an overused word, but as with many other overused words, it seems like the best one we have. My general feeling is that many people use it to signify something that’s “more local” than usual. I put that in quotes because that, too, is a somewhat nebulous term and will mean different things to different people in different places.