Whoa–Blue Delaware Gets Outed–And How

Just-wow.  Got this in my e-mailbox this morning.  I’m cutting and pasting the entire thing because I couldn’t find it on the Downballot website:

I discovered something yesterday that gutted me: A site called Blue Delaware has been stealing our content all year—verbatim, hundreds of words at a time—and publishing it as their own.

After we called them on it, they hastily deleted tons of posts. If you want an example, click here. And no, they didn’t acknowledge their theft or apologize in any way.

But what really wounded me is that the proprietor of that site, whose name is on the stolen posts, was a community member at Daily Kos—the same place where I got my start, and where I built the site that is now The Downballot. How could someone we once shared a formative political home with do this to us?

We work exceptionally hard here to produce quality, original journalism daily. We link and credit every source we rely on. And we make absolutely certain that we never, ever improperly use anyone else’s work. I couldn’t live with myself if we were anything but maximally scrupulous.

Yet so many people just don’t give a fuck. I’m not naive. I know stuff like this happens, all too often. But I’ll never understand the mindset of someone who engages in behavior like this, and I don’t want to.

I don’t know how many subscribers or how much traffic we lost because of this theft. But I do know, speaking as the publisher of a tiny independent news outlet, that every act like this makes an already challenging enterprise even harder to sustain.

So today, I hope you’ll help us recover from this violation by supporting us as a paid subscriber. I’d be extremely grateful.

Like us, Blue Delaware often functions as a news aggregator.  The same type of content that Blue Delaware churns out is pretty much the same content that the guy who used to post here, but now pretty much is Blue Delaware, used to churn out here.  It was always pretty much devoid of personality.  Something that, apparently, cutting-and-pasting without attribution lends itself to.

Unlike Blue Delaware, not only do we credit any and all sources when posting material (except those who don’t want to be credited), we view at least part of our role as being amplifiers.  As a news communications major myself,  I love the local journalists who are doing great work under trying circumstances.  I like to think that our respect creates some synergies when it comes to getting stories out to both our and their readerships.   I respect the national journalists whose great reporting often runs against the grain of what the corporate ownership of their journalistic vehicles might prefer.

Believe me, there’s so much more I’d like to say.  For now, however, I can only hope that we’ve heard the last of Blue Plagiarizer.