There's two ways to handle linking to someone else's work on a blog or news website.
Find an interesting paragraph, quote it, and link back to the post. Add a few lines of your own, if needed. You can also not quote and only link, but that's immaterial.
Take someone else's work, reword it, maybe add a link to an earlier related story you also lazily reworded, to give it a veneer of original reporting, and post it as a full 'new' news story.
@osnews has, since its inception, pretty much exclusively done 1. This is very old-fashioned and not SEO-friendly, but I am convinced it's the only correct way to link to someone else's work, and ensure as much traffic as possible is sent the source's way. I'm always very cognisant of the fact people tend to not follow links to sources, so I try to quote only a taste, a bite, a sample, ensuring people are encouraged to browse to the source and read it in full.
A lot of popular, funded, profit-driven tech news websites do 2. It makes it seem as if every story they post is original reporting, but in reality, it's just a form of theft. It's taking someone else's hard work, posted on a less well-known blog, rewording it just enough to seem original, and claim the clicks. (1/2)
@osnews I deeply despise authors and websites that do 2. It is willfully and specifically designed to keep visitors on your own, well-funded, profit-driven websites to gain the clicks, the ad revenue, the profits, while obscuring the fact you're just rewording someone else's work, something a 12 year old learns how to do in school.
What's worse is that websites that do 2 are often held up as the ones that do the actual reporting and hard work, while websites that do 1 and adhere to the older, fairer way of directing traffic to the people doing the real work, are seen as lazy.
Every person reading this guilty of 2 knows exactly what they're doing. It's uncouth.
@thomholwerda@osnews yeah, hard agree. The editor of one of the big horror sites fucking blocked me when I called him out for doing this to a colleague of mine a decade or so ago. Well, first he said it was fine because "everyone does it" THEN he blocked me when I refused to let it go.
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