Media

Poynter creates weird non-issue with Romenesko *

For reasons that aren't really clear, Jim Romenesko's bosses at the Poynter Institute have put up a long post making it sound as if they just discovered some issue with the way Romenesko has posted through the years: aggregating the language used by original sources, always with attribution to those sources. The post by Poynter's Julie Moos makes clear that 1) no one Romenesko quotes has ever complained, 2) his practice does not violate Poynter's written policies, but might run afoul of unwritten understandings in the office, and 3) apparently a lot of people she consulted within Poynter don't see any issue at all. I don't either. Moos writes as if she's got some quandary on her hands, and almost laughingly credits a "sharp-eyed" editor at CJR for pointing out the issue. They now plan to pre-edit Romemesko posts and put quotes around the parts of his summaries that use language from the media outlet he's aggregating — not that anyone apparently ever felt misled. Romenesko, by the way, has been aggregating in exactly this way for Poynter for a decade.

* Now Romenesko resigns: Somebody should probably go from Poynter over this train wreck, but it's not Jim Romenesko. "Nothingburger," says Time's critic James Poniewozik of the attribution issue that Poynter thinks it has.


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