TOI quotes bloggers with NO attribution
The Bangalore Times "supplement" of this morning's Times of India (TOI) has an article called Sabre-rattling in cyber space, which talks about the controversy about Indra Nooyi's recent comments. (I'm not going there.)
The article discusses the reaction of the blogosphere to the controversy and essentially is a collection of quotes from (what appears to be) different blogs. What was interesting was that the writer (Panchalee Thakur) did not mention even one blog's address. Are journalists this unaware of acceptable use and quoting policies? Or is this just journalistic hubris? When bloggers quote each other, there's always an attribution. How come a big newspaper like TOI sees no need to do this?
Or this it just not surprising anymore, given the way journalism is going now-a-days?
4 Comments:
Exactly my views. It is maddening when someone takes your original thought and does not even give you the credit for it. I wonder if TOI would remain mum if someone took articles of it's publication and post it claiming saying they got it from "some publication"! TOI has been doing this from quite sometime, taking articles from the web, making small changes, sometimes truncating them, X-( and publishing it. It is the truncating part that gets me mad. You read, read, and the end of it is not even a complete sentence!! So much for the editors...
Yeah, TOI does take articles from the web, or even news and sometimes you read attributions like, taken from the Internet. Hmm, that narrows it down a little.
I think TOI has so much revenue from its ad-stream plus the other businesses (Zoom, Planet M, etc.) they probably don't care if the newspaper is mediocre. TOI is not much better than a tabloid I think. Nothing wrong with being a tabloid, tabloids have their own readership. It's the part about "being a respected news source" or whatever and actually doing tabloid journalism that is irritating. The only redeeming feature is that the events happening in Bangalore are reported and that's the place where I find out about most of the live music shows, etc.
All of Bangalore Times' gossip is directly flicked from MSN.com. Guess they have some kind of agreement on that.
Sometimes the paper is really irritating, with reporting teenage drinking and partying on the first page and all those party goers raising their glasses on the third page. Quite an example for the youth.
But all said and done, I wouldnt read any other paper :)
Oh I didn't know about the MSN.com thing, thanks Deepak. Will be worth checking out MSN.com for all the TOI rumours now. I rarely read MSN.
I think this whole Page 3 culture is quite a pain in the royal rear end (I'd like to date some of those women though!) but I think it's here to stay. If you read TOI in Hyderabad, they have the same stuff, except it's the Hyderabad people. My friend from Delhi said that it's the same in Delhi. TOI's got the whole tabloid thing down very well.
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