The Curation Battle: The Verge vs. The Huffington Post

Here’s what happened. The Verge wrote this great feature and The Huffington Post “curated” it. Editor-in-Chief of The Verge was not pleased.

Formal public request. @bbosker and @huffingtonpost, please remove the content you’ve scraped from us. huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/the… Seriously.
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

What’s most egregious about this @huffingtonpost scrape is its theft of our SEO on title and text. Google “death of the american arcade”
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2
— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013

@bbosker no it didn’t.
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

Matthew Ingram of GigaOm jumped in to ask this very important question:

@joshuatopolsky: so if Google gives the HuffPo excerpt more prominence than the original Verge piece, is that Google’s fault or HuffPo’s?
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) January 23, 2013

Then Niley Patel, managing editor of The Verge jumped in:

Why should HuffPo take our content and republish any of it under a fake byline without permission? And then expect our fucking gratitude?
— nilay patel (@reckless) January 24, 2013

HuffPo is a 800lb gorilla wantonly stealing from a startup that invests heavily in production and design. Just not okay.
— nilay patel (@reckless) January 24, 2013

The Huffington Post has since shortened the post to a single sentence.

Here is my two cents: The Verge is a startup and they produce great stuff. I can’t imagine they have the same resources as HuffPo and they go the extra mile to make the site look great and their work is high quality. The Huffington Post makes great stuff too but they have gotten a bad wrap for over-curating (read: scraping).

This is a fight that has only just begun. Would The Verge care if HuffPo weren’t so massive? Couldn’t HuffPo have at least added a little bit of original content to the story instead of copying and pasting? And what the hell constitutes curation in 2013 anyway?

Even on the social web, we need to abide by a code of ethics. To me, The Verge is fighting the good fight. They curate a lot also but they always add original content/context and they always link to sources. It’s impossible to prevent scraping and it is unfortunate that we can’t rely on big time publishers to follow the unwritten code of the web.

Read a nice wrap-up of this story on Poynter.

30 notes | 4 months ago

Jimmy Daly

The Curation Battle: The Verge vs. The Huffington Post

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