Andy Chase

I'll be the first to admit that I'm hardly what you'd call a professional writer (even though I have written a couple of things for Webmonkey, [plug][plug]), and so perhaps it's not my place to criticize what seems to be a growing trend in online journalism... but I'm going to criticize it anyway. :)



What's with filling your news story with quotes pulled from various internet message boards? It's not really the same as interviewing somebody, either in person or via telephone or e-mail; there's no assurance that the poster meant their comment in the context in which it's being quoted in somebody else's article, and with popular forums like Slashdot often garnering more than 500 messages per topic, the opportunities to misquote some poor schmoe are endless. And even if a quote is in context, it's often insipid. The best recent example I can think of is Salon.com's article about MGM meddling with Stargate: SG1, which was chock full of fanatic message board commentary that made me want to grab Stargate fans everywhere by the shoulders, shake violently, and shout IT'S JUST A TV SHOW!!!



What really got me going today, though, was the aftermath of Slashdot co-founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's Valentine's Day marriage proposal to his sweetie; News stories quickly popped up at C-Net and Wired (where I saw my first message board quotation.) What blew my mind was the blurb that showed up on Newsforge - it was only a paragraph long, but it contained a quote of Wired's quote of a comment made in the original Slashdot discussion.



I know that I'm sometimes guilty of posting about things that I just read about on Wired, Slashdot, or wherever, but up until this entry I haven't posted things like

"Per Newsforge's announcement this afternoon, Wired news is reporting that Slashdot Co-Founder Rob Malda successfuly proposed to his girlfriend today."

It's just silly, and I don't see the purpose unless a news site feels it has to cite other news sites' coverage of something to give themselves some perceived credibility, as in "See, Wired and C-Net wrote about it! That makes us a news site too!"