I’ve been running
late on this blog all week long. Ideally, I would like to have something ready
the night before and then schedule it to post first thing in the morning. Hasn’t
happened in a long time. I’m kind of stuck at the moment, but I don’t want
another late night, just before midnight, barely counts type of thing, so I am
forcing myself to write. I will do this post in response to the fourteenth
story listed on my yahoo front page. Let’s go see what it is.
As a long time
restaurant employee, I could probably add a bunch of comments to this story. My
own little suggestions, comments on proper procedure, other Anthony Bourdain
type tips. But, let’s ask the question, is this really a “story?”
If you read the
link, it is actually a rehashing (pardon the pun) of a Ask Reddit question. For
those of you who don’t know what Reddit is, perhaps it is better not to know.
It can be a huge time suck of web browsing and probably costs companies
billions of dollars in lost productivity. For our purposes, you can think of it
as an electronic water cooler where people will gossip, make comments or longer
stories on various topics and, sometimes, offer productive advice.
To create this
content for Yahoo, this person took comments from the Reddit site and wrote a
little article with them. The author does credit each comment to its original
poster, albeit with the Reddit user name rather than the legal name. Since the
internet provides some sense of anonymity, perhaps this is the proper citation
to make.
But how much of an
effort does it really take to cherry pick the best comments and call it a “story”
or “article?” Shouldn’t there just be a link to the Reddit site and let the
readers view the material first hand?
In the era of
easily distributable material, where you can grab content with just a thin
device in your pocket, the demand for content is unquenchable. Everyone can
have their own channel, website, (blog!) and they need to have something, anything, to put on it. As the time
required to share news shortens, so does its shelf life.
When a newspaper
was a once a week occurrence, topics would the public’s attention span for a
month. With the telegraph and daily newspapers, the race for scoops began in earnest,
with publishers going so far as to CREATE the news. With today’s instant forms
of communication, our demand is so immediate, we don’t even wait for it to be
printed. Is it any wonder that we can’t even write it quick enough? Thus the
relisting of someone else’s’ bullet points becomes worthy of “publishing” with
a byline.
Creating fresh
content is hard. Anyone reading more than a couple of these posts will
certainly affirm that frequency can hurt quality. AND, I’ve resorted to posting
a link of a clip or pictures when crushed for time. (So, a little case of the
pot talking to the kettle here.) But I haven’t resorted to copying Reddit, yet.
That’s another good goal to have.
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