An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.
The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.
This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.
Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.
Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.
I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.
Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.