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Hooray for original content

By William Bakker | 02.05.25 | Comment?

Clay Shirky predicts a mass disruption of the syndication model in journalism.

Most content in newspapers is syndicated. This means one story is often published in different newspapers. This made sense when newspapers served different geographical regions. But on the internet it’s just duplication.

In Google, many links to one page is better than many links to many pages of the same content. This hurts syndicated content because it’s distributed. Websites like the Huffingtonpost, Techmeme and others

This is one of the reason why Wikipedia ranks so well and Reuters stories are not. Google is trying to address this and move towards giving credit where credit is due to original content.

Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t original or unique.

Another example of content is King. Original content that is.


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