What Will The End of Newspapers Mean For Blogging?

Here’s the real issue behind the fall of the Newspaper industry. What will all those bloggers do when there are no newspapers left and they can’t scrape content from a newspaper while hiding behind the “fair use” doctrine?

If you’re not familiar with scraping content, it works like this. Cut and paste the opening paragraph from the online version of an in print Newspaper article. You can put it in quotes, with a link to the original source if you are generous, or just reference it without a source. Charts and tables are also copied into the blog. You then frame the content with your thoughts on it afterward.

You’d be surprised how much web content is derived from this without any thought to how difficult it is to write these newspaper articles. No consideration is given to the hours spent researching stories or wading through dense government press releases, or the years spent cultivating sources, etc.

I just looked at the front page of a highly followed blogger who has been in the news a lot lately, and fully 50% of his stories are scraped from other publications. This blogger does give full credit to the source with a link. Just something to think about.