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It's b/c it's the NYTimes-- they actually do reporting & journalism.

There's seems to be a lot of piggybacking/freeloading off of original reporting. I was involved with a project that got a big splashy NYTimes write up and it was astonishing in the coming days to see how many joker press outlets basically crimped off the Times' original reporting. They'd include a link and all that but they'd lift the juciest quotes/content and the only thing they'd contribute was some usually sassy commentary.

Here's a really vivid example-- great write up about Target detecting a pregnancy from purchase data: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

It's a great little news nugget- provocative, interesting, yadda yadda.

And then before you know it, all these "summary"/"reaction" stories get published which didn't exactly contribute much or move the ball down the field:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-s...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How-Target-k...

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t...

I'm not sure if this is a real problem or not, but it seems kind of lame that those other groups get to sit on their cans and pontificate while others get out of their offices.



See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism:

> In his book Flat Earth News,[3] the British journalist Nick Davies reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers[4] which found that 80% of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12% of stories were generated by reporters.[1]


This has been a standard practice with journalism for a long, long time.




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