One of the reasons that fudged statistics and even outright lies have a tendency to spread rapidly through the mainstream media is that the mainstream media does something that the blogosphere is only just waking up to: re-writing competitors’ stories without doing additional reporting.

In other words, one way to rapidly and cheaply generate content is to copy other outlets’ facts, narratives, even conclusions, and re-write them as if they were your own. Crazy? Unethical? Then why do so many respected blogs — and even Google News — get away with it?

While it’s illegal to plagiarize someone else’s work, it’s not illegal to re-write the same news that someone else has already reported. That means that, especially online, there really isn’t any way to protect the investment someone has put into doing original reporting on a subject — this is bad for people who make news, and good for everyone who is simply aggregating the fruits of their labor.

When a story is re-reported, sometimes the source material is credited, and sometimes it’s not. But the fact is, if your summary of someone else’s story is good enough, hardly anyone will bother to visit the original even if you credit it. That means you get all the traffic. Here’s an example:

One of the things that big blogs like Engadget and BoingBoing get away with all the time is writing their own version of someone else’s story. (This is only natural — they function as aggregators more than primary sources of news, though to its credit Engadget does significant amounts of original reporting.)

BoingBoing does this to Scientific American (my employer) all the time, and, despite BoingBoing’s huge readership, their linking to us at the end of their posts based on our stories generates only negligible traffic for us. Probably because, well, why by the cow when you can get the milk for free? Which is to say, they do a good job of summarizing our articles and clipping out the best bits — their short, pithy rewrites make our full write-ups look unappetizingly large and cumbersome by comparison.

On only one occasion, I discovered that I could turn the tables on these aggregator-blogs. By some miracle, my blog post on, of all things, an Engadget post ended up getting on Reddit and Buzzfeed instead of the original Engadget post. I like to think it’s because I managed to give an otherwise boring article a punchy title:

Details on Taser’s XREP electric shotgun shell emerge (original Engadget piece)

Does this look like a nonlethal weapon to you? (My remix of the original Engadget piece — now with a politically-charged headline!) — Buzzfeed, Reddit

When re-reporting works… and when it doesn’t

I realize that this flies in the face of most of the prevailing thinking on what drives traffic to a blog, which holds that original content is the key to building readership. This is true if you’re posting once a day; in that case simply re-reporting other’s work would get you nowhere fast. But there is another way.

Blogs that function as true aggregators of information are updated at least a half-dozen times a day. Often they are written by people who would be writing for a living anyway, for example Om Malik of GigaOM media.

Another example is Hank Green of EcoGeek.org. EcoGeek is primarily an aggregator of other folks’ content — but because Hank is so good about keeping it fresh, and because he’s been so savvy in a number of other ways, his site has become a destination, like BoingBoing or TechCrunch. The result is that, with all apologies to Hank, he can get away with writing posts that are more or less identical to their source material, for example the EcoGeek post about solar chargers vs. the Good Clean Tech post from which he drew his facts and image.

These sort of blogs — call them news aggregators — are no different than, say, Google News. Their value to the reader comes from the curatorial function carried out by their authors — this is all the news that one person (or a computer algorithm) thinks you need to know about. The original source of the information does not matter, as long as you present it in a stylish, well written, and most of all targeted manner. Good writing or simply deep knowledge of a subject plus an obsessive interest in (and the spare time available for) covering a subject area completely are the primary requirements of running a blog of this kind.

*And by stealing, I mean aggregating.