'My Year Ripping Off the Web with the Daily Mail Online'

Source: Gawker
By James King

... MailOnline—which has since changed its name to DailyMail.com in order to "mak[e] deeper inroads … with ad firms on Madison Avenue," according to the Wall Street Journal—has been widely hailed as a blueprint for the future of online journalism. It reaches hundreds of millions of readers, and it has hired former BuzzFeed COO Jon Steinberg to help turn those gargantuan traffic numbers into profit. Earlier this year, DailyMail.com acquired U.S.-based site Elite Daily, the so-called "Voice of Generation Y."

... The Mail's editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication.

Yes, most outlets regularly aggregate other publications' work in the quest for readership and material, and yes, papers throughout history have strived for the grabbiest headlines facts will allow. But what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper. In a little more than a year of working in the Mail's New York newsroom, I saw basic journalism standards and ethics casually and routinely ignored. I saw other publications' work lifted wholesale. I watched editors at the most highly trafficked English-language online newspaper in the world publish information they knew to be inaccurate.

... But it doesn't matter what the Mail is trying to be. What matters is what it actually is: a publication with millions of readers—many of whom believe what they're reading—that is not only cited as a credible news outlet by other publications, but is also being held out as the new model for online journalism. With the reach the Mail has come to enjoy comes responsibilities that it either doesn't realize, or doesn't care about.

Read more: http://gawker.com/my-year-ripping-off-the-web-with-the-daily-mail-online-1689453286