If you’ve ever wanted to peer deep into the hive mind of Philly.com to see how webspeak of the moment coupled with genuinely bad ideas conspire together in the city’s most shit-tastically awful online news resource, just follow Chris Krewson on Twitter. Krewson is the Inquirer‘s executive editor of online news and he tweets, tweets, tweets, all the livelong day. It’s fascinating. And usually groanworthy. But this time, we have to side with Krewson. Yesterday, he called out NBCPhiladelphia for what is quickly becoming an open secret in Philadelphia media: If you post a news story of any worth (or in some cases, extremely questionable worth) that’s not generated from a press release that NBCPhiladelphia is already getting, there is a high likelihood that NBCPhiladelphia will basically rewrite your story in the most obvious, like-duh way possible and often be stingy about throwing you a hat tip in the process. At issue for Krewson yesterday was a story that NBCPhiladelphia had obviously folgered from an Inky story that ran earlier that day. And, by gum, he’s right. We know because we’ve been victims of this as well; over the last few months, a number of items that first appeared on Philebrity have been quickly turned into NBCPhiladelphia stories and often, without any hat tip whatsoever. (We contacted NBCPhiladelphia regarding the Inky matter, but they declined comment.) The question then becomes: Is NBCPhiladelphia plagiarizing? Well, no, not quite. They’re just being unoriginal dicks. Which isn’t a crime, but is bad for your brand. And, as Krewson states above, suing them isn’t the answer. Shaming them is.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 4:14 pm.