07 October, 2006

Too much syndicated material?

Reading the Unwind insert in the Gulf News it struck me how much of the material is actually not written by Gulf News. In fact none of the articles in the insert is by Gulf News. Going through the articles we find: New York Times, The Telegraph Group, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Los Angeles Times/Washington Post, Los Angeles Times/Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times/Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times/Washington Post, New York Times, and New York Times. You get the picture ;-)

I can perhaps understand the benefit of using material from other sources once in a while, because perhaps they've covered something you couldn't, but isn't this a bit much? A whole section of a major newspaper not written by the newspaper...

12 comments:

grapeshisha said...

Coupled with official items from the Government.

archer14 said...

GN Editor says:
OMG...Holy Shit....Ppl r reading da newspaper these days.
Time to unleash Plan B - From tomorrow - more 'young times' materials for you intellectuals out there. Get your crayons ready! Sharpen your pencils and..
GET READY FOR THE ULTIMATE BATTLE WITH YOUR KIDS!

secretdubai said...

It's quite standard practice to syndicate. I'd rather read quality from overseas on the weekend than local drivel. But they should perhaps market it as a "digest" rather than their own produced supplement.

bizzwhizz said...

i agree SD and its isnt so bad to syndicate as long as you get focused and quality stuff to read .

Anonymous said...

how about khaleej times? gulf today? same thing,no?!

bizzwhizz said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
bizzwhizz said...

Maybe I got lucky to have been plagerized from or its just plain luck but I think GulfNews is fostering palagerism ... its a pity on 2nd Oct I posted an item about UAE's the 77th Ranking in ease of doing business on UAEc and my blog and then earlier I had posted the news about Arab Science and Tech Foudation and how they honoured the local scientists in a function held on 11th April 2006 which was in todays gulf news by a staff reporter along with the ranking item, arent they supposed to have published it when it happened and not when their reporter plagerised it from an online blog without honouring the source.. what a pityyyyyyyyy

samuraisam said...

void: Welcome to the club.

I've noticed startling differences between stuff I've written and stuff that has appeared in UAE papers. I have caught a Gulf News journalist pretty much red handed. Other similarities I've recently noticed have been between my criticism of Etisalat recieving an award, and then mysteriously, the next day in 7days a very similar article magically pops up; I also spotted similarities between another article they 'wrote' and another bloggers that I'd read previously; sadly I was never able to track down the original post and I instead let it go.

secretdubai said...

Well, it's going to happen more and more. At some point, newspapers are going to have to learn to attribute their story finds to blogs, like we do to them (with article linking and direct quoting).

Because you know how much more innovative, creative, and revenge hungry the online world is...

Woke said...

It is definitely the factor that makes GN a better newspaper when compared with KT and the likes.

But then expectedly, it is neither a local perspective of global issues or a global perspective of local issues.

Seabee said...

They simply don't have the resources to set up offices or correspondents all over the world, and using agency/syndicated material is standard practice with all the world's media.

I'd also much rather read items from real news sources than the badly written garbage that most of our 'journalists' come up with. Look at the sources you mention, all top newspapers. Ours aren't in the same league - they're not even on the same planet.

SD I agree, they really are going to have to attribute blog material that they currently steal.

bandicoot said...

If GN restricts its coverage to reports from local courts and stories from RAK it would become a great comic publication; no need for tasteless editorials, local "writers" masterpieces, and syndicated bs!

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