March 14, 2006

Cut & Paste Journalism: Adrants

by Piers Fawkes

For a moment, we thought AdRants had gone off and done some exclusive, investigatory journalism and produced an extensive post on the new clothing range called Release inspired by the Scion brand. Then we found an almost identical press release.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re kings of content aggregation, but when we riff off a press release we (a) like to let our audience know and (b) think it’s a but sad to reproduce someone’s whole press release into a huge ad-blog article.

Thoughts?

As an additional thought. Does anyone think that the "celebrities and teams" like the urban mags are selling out??

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3 Responses to “Cut & Paste Journalism: Adrants”

  1. henry lambert
    Posted from: 87.74.40.246

    March 14th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    It’s one thing to quote a press release but quite another to copy it word for word. It’s something that’s endemic in the ad industry sadly and this may be a bad habit picked up from the marketing press. I appreciate that bloggers work hard to keep posting, but they need to differentiate themselves somehow.

    It’s also just plain polite to link to the source.

  2. dj mirateck
    Posted from: 64.52.71.194

    March 14th, 2006 at 6:01 pm

    I’d estimate that 90% of ad supported blogs out there do exactly what adrants is doing, which is basically aggregating, filtering, and publishing press releases and other sourced information out to willing readers. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, there are agencies out there that exist for the very purpose of getting such releases up on sites like adrants, in verbatim or in a more conventional “journalistic” tone.

    By definition, bloggers aren’t journalists, and they shouldn’t be expected to adhere to any standards set by the journalism or PR communities.

    I personally frequent adrants for the very reason you diss them- out of the thousands of press releases sent out into the media community every day, they seem to post the truly interesting ones, and throw in some witty side commentary to boot.

  3. up001
    Posted from: 216.115.180.7

    March 15th, 2006 at 10:11 am

    Where’s all the ranting on adrants? What started as a place to call out crappy advertising practices has become a place that turns a blind eye.

    They should change the name to adbreasts

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