Butch McLarty over at London's altlondon.org has a thing or to to say about the Best of the Blogs roundup mentioned in our Dan Brown newspaper clipping posting:
He writes:
He writes:
"Speaking of Dan Brown's method of finding the 'Best of the Blogs' in Saturday's LFP (London Free Press). Local bloggers need to tell the LFP sweat shop to either pay up or go pound salt.
Every Saturday, the el cheapo Freep runs a cheesy little feature called the Best of the Blogs in its rinky-dink Comment section.
Not only do they not pay the respective writers for using their copyrighted material, they don't even ask the author if they can use it. Outrageous!
By filling up the paper with as much free editorial content as humanly possible, they generate more black ink for newspaper butcher Quebecor's bottom line.
The sad part of it is that most local bloggers being used/exploited by the LFP appear to like it for the so-called free exposure. Pitiful!
Show some jam-tart folks and tell the LFP sweat shop to either pay up or go pound salt."
Thank you for your comments, Butch.
possible solution the bloggers should push for: LFP can publish a quote, and provide a link. Bloggers with ads will likely benefit.
ReplyDeleteOr simply write a lot of anti-LFP content.
UPDATE: The "Best of the Blogs" is not in today's (Sat. Oct. 3) Comment section of The London Free Press for the first time in ages.
ReplyDeleteFine by me.
I'd like to think it was because a local blogger told the Freep to go pound salt ~ but the Freep never asked permission in the past to steal copyrighted material for their print edition and sadly, our local bloggers tend to be wimps.
Ah, I hope "Best of the Blogs" is not going to be history. I was so hoping that one of my pieces, like the one in which Dan Brown and the Free Press green blogger discuss the merits of peeing in the shower, would be featured. http://rockinontheblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/too-green-lfp-green-blogger.html
ReplyDeleteOr when I helped out the Freeps by showing them that yes you could fry an egg using just the heat from the sun. Paul Berton, the editor-in-chief, wrote that one thing he had learned from being a journalist was that this stunt couldn't be done in Canada. But thanks to global warming, I pulled it off in August, late summer in London. http://rockinontheblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/hot-enought-to-fry-egg.html
Cheers,
ex-Free Press photographer, Ken Wightman
Now just Rockinon.