A list of bullet points: Y’know what I hate?

• Reporters copying the press release.
• Bonus tracks at the end of albums that are tacked onto the end of the last song. Especially if the bonus isn’t as good as the last song (see Kings of Leon: Holy Roller Novocaine).
• Mainstream media outlets on the net covertly stealing blog posts.

1 and 3 go together here. When I go to a site like Stuff.co.nz I like to read news, real news, not opinion. Interesting stuff that has been investigated and analysed. Currently I get some good news, some stuff regurgitated from overseas feeds, some stuff regurgitated from press releases and, now, blogs.

Jo’s new blog (and it is a blog this time not an online journal) helps me sum this up: Blogs are Letters to the Editor. A newspaper would never write its own letters to the editor (unless it had no scruples) so why would an online newspaper (Stuff, Herald) do it?

But as for stealing blog posts, I was reading a rugby article the other day on Stuff that was congratulating another Stuff reporter for pre-empting those evil northern hemisphere reports who always claim that the All Blacks are poaching from the Pacific nations. Confused yet? A quote should sort this out:

In a column appearing on Stuff on September 12 headlined Time British scribes got it right, Kayes pointed out that there are more New Zealand-born players in Samoa's squad than Samoan-born players in the All Blacks - debunking the myth that New Zealand gobbles up the Pacific's finest while offering nothing in return.

Except that there was a post on the Dropkicks website on the 11^th that contained the exact same information. The Dropkicks aren’t a huge site (but we are growing!) and so perhaps this isn’t a real conspiracy…except that the post was rewritten by the Dropkicks and posted on the very popular Public Address site the morning of the 12^th. I don’t want to come straight out and accuse Stuff of poaching things off blogs but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.

I know that a good journalist (or columnist in this case) should always check the sources themselves etc etc, but not even a mention or a “hat tip”?

Burst culture done for the day.