Your newspaper..?
11/03/04 10:15 Media
issues
My thanks to reader Graham Holliday, who has drawn my
attention to the new tie-up between
The Guardian
in the UK and Salon in the US. Essentially
Salon
- which is one of those papers not afraid to
challenge the establishment - will swap stories with
The Guardian on occasion to offer readers of both
publications fresh perspectives on world events.
Which is fine on the surface. But this isn't the first time story-swapping has gone on. The current Life section of The Guardian, for which I write, takes a lot of content at the front of the book from Nature magazine. And the Independent on Sunday famously gets its business news from Bloomberg. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an insider secret, they're clearly labelled as what they are.
So, does this matter? I think it might if it continues to grow as a trend. Call me an old curmudgeon, but when I buy The Guardian I like to read The Guardian, when I buy The Times I want to read The Times - not something that's been through another editorial team first. Granted this may be unrealistic if you want to read the specialist on a given subject, so the benefits may outweigh the downsides, but there are issues about taking copy from other publications that need thinking through. If one of the originating publications committed a libel inadvertently, for example, there's the chance of spreading it further and implicating another publication in it. And there's the risk of compromising your distinctive editorial voice.
And if I might go into selfish git mode for a moment, there's the issue for freelance writers specialising in an area who find suddenly that there's less scope for their work because a publication's slots are taken up with syndicated copy. In the hands of the Guardian this works fine because they have so far applied the idea judiciously; I could see less well-resourced publications starting to import sections wholesale and really shutting the freelance contributor out.
The benefits are still many, and there is scope for building in perspectives that would otherwise have been unavailable to the reader by going to other publications. It's one to watch, though.
Which is fine on the surface. But this isn't the first time story-swapping has gone on. The current Life section of The Guardian, for which I write, takes a lot of content at the front of the book from Nature magazine. And the Independent on Sunday famously gets its business news from Bloomberg. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an insider secret, they're clearly labelled as what they are.
So, does this matter? I think it might if it continues to grow as a trend. Call me an old curmudgeon, but when I buy The Guardian I like to read The Guardian, when I buy The Times I want to read The Times - not something that's been through another editorial team first. Granted this may be unrealistic if you want to read the specialist on a given subject, so the benefits may outweigh the downsides, but there are issues about taking copy from other publications that need thinking through. If one of the originating publications committed a libel inadvertently, for example, there's the chance of spreading it further and implicating another publication in it. And there's the risk of compromising your distinctive editorial voice.
And if I might go into selfish git mode for a moment, there's the issue for freelance writers specialising in an area who find suddenly that there's less scope for their work because a publication's slots are taken up with syndicated copy. In the hands of the Guardian this works fine because they have so far applied the idea judiciously; I could see less well-resourced publications starting to import sections wholesale and really shutting the freelance contributor out.
The benefits are still many, and there is scope for building in perspectives that would otherwise have been unavailable to the reader by going to other publications. It's one to watch, though.
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