(1) I object to the use of the term "stole" - there is no indication that the Forbes blogger did anything unethical. She gave links and full attribution to the NYT article and therefore helped to promote it. YES, the quotes from it are more extensive and lengthy than you would normally see but on the other hand it IS a NINE page article so I am pretty sure the excerpts still falls under Fair Use.
(2) The article in question is a feature article in the NYT Sunday magazine which is where they put the long in-depth articles which took months to investigate. These are meant to be Pulitzer Prize level pieces that will get people talking and make a big splash in the news cycle. This explains both the length and the title. There is NO WAY the NYT Sunday Magazine is going to lead with a sensationalist headline like “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.“ That smacks of The National Enquirer or something. The title they actually used (“How Companies Learn Your Secrets“) is not THAT bad either - it got me to click on it when I saw it.
(3) Most importantly, I don't see how Facebook Likes can be the sole metric of an article's "success." This weeks NYT Sunday Magazine is just officially coming out today. This is a front page article. Lots of people are going to be reading,talking and emailing it all week. And when they do they are going to send the link to the source and NYT will get the credit.
(4) Lastly, - no evidence is given that the TITLE was the SOLE reason why the Forbes post went viral. It is an interesting topic and the Forbes blogger adequately summarized it, making the post very "shareable." The promotion and SEO strategies of Forbes may also have helped.
So in summary the Forbes blog and the NYT magazine are very different types of publications and it looks like they both succeeded in what they were trying to do.
The Forbes "article" would have qualified as blogspam in every community I've been in. Giving proper attribution and linkback is a necessary but insufficient requirement.
The question is: how much did Forbes add to the original content to warrant a clickthrough? If nothing of value was added, then Forbes is just jacking clicks.
This is something many subreddits have had to deal with - the many, may spam blogs that simply aggregate links (even if properly attributed) without providing anything of additional value. In the subreddits I frequent we've started banning these, maybe the Internet as a whole should also.
It's amazing how prevalent it is these days to click on a link to read a tiny pithy excerpt of a fuller article. Click on that only to realize that it is also scraped content with no additional value or commentary. You have to get 5-7 clicks in just to find the original, interesting source that actually did any work.
"how much did Forbes add to the original content to warrant a clickthrough? "
Forbes filtered the article and presented the most enticing part.
Filtering/curation is of enormous value - on the web and in app stores. It's ironic that you post this on a news aggregator site. The corresponding (but perhaps more obviously absurd) argument is what value does Hacker News (or Reddit) add to these stories that HN/Reddit deserve your page views? Just visit all the target sites yourself! Skip the middleman.
"The question is: how much did Forbes add to the original content to warrant a clickthrough? If nothing of value was added, then Forbes is just jacking clicks."
I think a better question is whether or not the Forbes article actually took clicks away from the NYT article. I doubt it actually did. If anything the NYT article probably got more clicks than it would have gotten otherwise. Yeah, it sucks that the person who did all the work isn't the one who got the credit, but it's hard to see how they're worse off for the Forbes piece.
Forbes article was great and there is a link to the source. I tried to read NYT article, but it was too long. NYT articles in general are full of the fluff.
(4) ... all the required elements for attracting attention are there:
teen girl
pregnant
father
It is true that the title would smack of a national enquirer post than NYT. However, NYT probably could have their own bloggers crafting juicer headlines and summaries that lead to the main article.
(2) The article in question is a feature article in the NYT Sunday magazine which is where they put the long in-depth articles which took months to investigate. These are meant to be Pulitzer Prize level pieces that will get people talking and make a big splash in the news cycle. This explains both the length and the title. There is NO WAY the NYT Sunday Magazine is going to lead with a sensationalist headline like “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.“ That smacks of The National Enquirer or something. The title they actually used (“How Companies Learn Your Secrets“) is not THAT bad either - it got me to click on it when I saw it.
(3) Most importantly, I don't see how Facebook Likes can be the sole metric of an article's "success." This weeks NYT Sunday Magazine is just officially coming out today. This is a front page article. Lots of people are going to be reading,talking and emailing it all week. And when they do they are going to send the link to the source and NYT will get the credit.
(4) Lastly, - no evidence is given that the TITLE was the SOLE reason why the Forbes post went viral. It is an interesting topic and the Forbes blogger adequately summarized it, making the post very "shareable." The promotion and SEO strategies of Forbes may also have helped.
So in summary the Forbes blog and the NYT magazine are very different types of publications and it looks like they both succeeded in what they were trying to do.