Vampire Webpages Suck Content From Legitimate Progressive News Sites

[Hestia]

http://www.alternet.org/media/vampire-webpages-suck-content-legitimate-progressive-news-sites

Vampire Webpages Suck Content From Legitimate Progressive News Sites
A parasitic business model thrives on Facebook.
By Steven Rosenfeld, Ivy Olesen / AlterNet March 6, 2017

Some new media vampires on the internet block are pilfering content from independent journalism websites and deceitfully posting it as their own on Facebook, the premier social media platform.

These Facebook pages and their affiliated websites pose as progressive champions, but their content is largely copied, if not plagiarized, from legitimate news and opinion outlets with real reporters and analysts, not rewrite teams. Their goal appears to be making money by attracting millions of readers as unknowing users click on links or share their memes—photos with slogans—because viewer traffic generates advertising revenues via Google ads.

Anyone who has a Facebook page and pays attention to politics—and shares with a circle of friends—has seen the vampires’ work. Even professionals in media, information technology and progressive politics often share posts and links to affiliated sites such as Occupy Democrats (5.9 million Facebook likes and 1.1 million monthly U.S. viewers on its website, according to Quantcast), The Other 98% (4.5 million Facebook likes; its related The Other 98 Percent Action Fund has 214,000 monthly U.S. viewers) and USUncut (1.5 million Facebook likes and 2.8 million monthly viewers). Indeed, there are hundreds of other pages and sites like these, such as Addicting Info, with 1.2 million Facebook likes, Liberal America with 754,000 Facebook likes, and a new six-week-old Facebook page, Resistance Report, with 144,000 Facebook likes.

[snippage]

To investigate this phenomenon, AlterNet started a free 14-day trial from Spike to track the vampire sites and their audiences. The New York Times magazine wrote about this trend last summer, but missed the plagiarism aspect. Nonetheless, its profile, titled, “Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Intentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine,” with the subhead, “How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds,” affirms the basic contours of the online vampire media industry. Surely, you’ve noticed: “A video of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid with text, shared from a source you’ve never seen before, viewed 15 million times. An article questions Hillary Clinton’s honesty; a headline questioning Donald Drumpf’s sanity.”

much more at link
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I've been noticing that people are posting from these vampire sites instead of the original journalistic site. Quite possibly these sites need to be blacklisted. We have to fight tooth and nail for investigative journalism and we do not need to "steal" money (from clicks) from them. They need every dime they can get.

[KittyWampus]

1. There's sort of a muddy area that places like Rawstory exist. They never seem to do any original

journalistic reporting. They take news stories and repackage them. Yes, their work has embedded links to where the original content comes from. And yes, they do reword the stories.

Thanks for posting, I'll read the whole thing later.

[MineralMan]

2. Copy and Paste Journalism Isn't Journalism at all.

It's dishonest, really. Often, it doesn't even link to the original source. It's theft, pure and simple.

The problem is that there is no recourse against it. Legitimate journalists can do nothing but watch as their hard work is stolen. You can't sue, because there's no money to recover. You can't sue, because half of the sites are based outside of the US.

The ability to copy and paste without any penalty is destroying legitimate journalism, frankly. Why work? Just steal the work of others.

It's a very sad thing to watch, from the perspective of a journalist. I'm glad I'm retired from that business, frankly.

[Hestia]

4. I was trying to find links to stories to figure out if they are vampire sites but sometimes it is

next to impossible.

[TransitJohn]

3. It's theft, and very lucrative

The same thing goes on with original video content. Facebook and Twitter don't seem much to care to help the producers, since they get served ad revenue no matter who uploads the content.