The Death of Journalism?

I had to take a break last week.

So, I'll get back into the groove of blogging by pointing you to an excellent article by Ian Shapira of the Washington Post about how an article he wrote was stolen by Gawker. What's worse is that because of current copyright laws, this kind of Internet thievery cannot be stopped. The laws that allowed news organizations to sue when their work is used without permission or credit disappeared in the 1970s.

My metaphor for the state of journalism - and newspapers - is that we are standing on a shrinking sheet of ice. And Shapira's article explains how the blogosphere is applying a blow torch under our feet. As Shapira explains, what I do in properly crediting and linking my readers to his story is fair. But what Gawker did was to summarize most of his story without properly linking to and crediting his work. They used so much of his piece that the typical reader would find no need to click on the link to the actual article.

Here's the article: The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)