★ My Issue with Mashable, Huffington Post, Business Insider and every other up modern news site

Each day, I go out of my way to find the original source of a news article. As soon as I hit a page that I know doesn’t employ reporters and isn’t known to actually report original news or is a site that simple writes blurbs about every hot topic in order to get search traffic, I immediately start looking for the “via” link at the bottom of the article. If there isn’t one, I close the window and try to find the original myself. I spend a few minutes doing this because I feel it’s worth visiting the original source and giving them the page views they so rightly deserve. I don’t care if Huffington Post is only embedding a video on YouTube, I immediately click through to YouTube because I don’t want to give Huffington Post any more than 5 seconds of my time each day.

My friend Krissy posted a link last night. I clicked through, freaked out because it was a bullshit site that just is driving traffic for advertising and I did some footwork to find the actual source of the story.

  1. Krissy’s Tweet
  2. Bit.ly expanded statistics page to make sure the link she posted was to a site free of malware (How sad that 99.5 generated 1K clicks to their page that told absolutely ZERO about the story)
  3. The bit.ly link resolves a story on Hot 99.5 which just posted a blurb and a link to Newser
  4. Newser which had more info and quietly linked to BBC within the main text
  5. BBC which is the publisher of this news and rightly deserves my eyeballs more than any other source

This is obviously an effort that most of the Internet isn’t willing or able to go through and modern media firms know this which is why the current landscape is 1000:1 of sites that re-post content and aggregate a curated collection of news that they simply discover from original sources. Traditional news gathering / reporting groups like NewsCorp and NYTimes are also doing this more and more. As budgets tighten, they spend more time reporting Reuters or AP content than gathering it themselves. It’s a result of the journalism sector changing in a big way.

I understand getting more of your news from the AP and conveying that to your readers. What I don’t understand is the sites like Mashable that may post 80 stories that were somewhere else and 10 editorials that are more Op-Ed than actual journalism. I’m not picking on Mashable because they’re the worst at this. That honor clearly goes to Huffington Post (which did such a great job that AOL paid 300 million for the company earlier this year). The beef I have with Mashable is that I’ve been to their parties and events, half of their original writers are people who I’m friends with and who I follow on Twitter and Mashable used to have a coveted spot on my RSS reader I only reserve for 20 news sites. To add another site means I remove another so it was hard removing Mashable from my reader but easier when their content switched from technology to entertainment and pop culture.

Here’s an example of why Mashable’s future is so damn disappointing.

My friend Christina Warren posts a tweet that I’m very interested in. It’s John Lasseter on Charlie Rose in a 60 minute interview talking about Pixar and Steve Jobs. Here’s Christina’s Tweet:

“From last night – watch if you haven’t already RT @mashable Pixar Exect Talks Steve Jobs and “Brave” [VIDEO]http://on.mash.to/uGHiGC

I blocked the official @Mashable account a long time ago because, when you follow 5 of their staff writers, the logo will appear in your Twitter timeline dozens of times a day. No matter though, because the writers still do text based retweets of Mashable throughout the day. It’s frustrating but I deal with it because these are friends. I don’t click “Mash.to” links though just like I avoid “Huff.po” links. I don’t click them and I’m bummed with a Mashable link gets put into a Bit.ly and I get there by mistake. The thing about Mashable is I didn’t stop visiting simply because they stopped reporting news I care about but because their site is god-awful slow. It takes close to a minute to load their site to where comments show up. There’s so much damn Javascript that using their site is vomit-inducing.

Anyway, I Googled for the interview knowing that it wasn’t originally posted to Mashable and found a Charlie Rose link to it on the site, I watched CBS ads and then saved the video to my Boxee box “watch later” queue for tonight. I went through 2 minutes of work to not give Mashable those page views.

There is a value from these aggregation w/ Op-Ed kind of sites because dozens of writers maintain a constant stream of news that they find interesting but they way they report this news, sneakily hiding the source and using outlandish titles and other SEO-bait post styles that optimize pageviews and not educating readers…well, it’s just a huge bummer. I can’t get behind sites like this despite the fact that there are thousands of them out there all making millions of dollars but I truly believe true journalists have to sell their soul to work at sites like Huffington Post and it’s disappointing.

I encourage everyone to not click links from these sites. Go through the extra effort to find the original source and patronize the journalist who actually reported the story and not the group of assholes that are capitalizing on someone else’s hard work. I don’t think my friends who work at Mashable are assholes but I certainly feel like you have to go through some sort of depression to take a job where you steal content from elsewhere and optimize it for page views.

MG Siegler recently covered a Business Insider situation that perfectly captures how angry I get about content like this.