Aug 29 2008
Read all about it – times three!
This is just a quick reaction to this little Romenesko tidbit about three newspapers in South Florida, owned by three different news companies, who have entered into an agreement to share certain types of stories.
Great! People in Florida must be ecstatic that they can now read the same stories on three different websites. What a huge windfall for them.
Look, this is a fabulous idea for their print products. Why send three different reporters to cover the same events? You know the stories are going to be pretty similar at any rate. So be efficient and cooperate.
The problem is that you know these same stories are going to end up on each paper’s website. The head ed at the Herald said so in his memo:
A second part of the experiment will enable the papers to pick up reviews – from theater to restaurant reviews – for publication on both the web and in print.
Three different places where you can savour the heady nuance of viewing the same review three times, each with its own different masthead and advertising down the side. Three different places for news aggregators to pick up the same story and then report it on their own sites as three different stories, each with some implied incremental value-add to entice you to read each one.
Google should punish at least two of the websites for doing this – but which two?
I’ll give them the same advice I gave the AP: let only one website publish each article, presumably the one that actually did the story. The others can link to it, giving their content-sharing partner some link love.
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