Bloggers Deserve More Respect

How could a newspaper say ""the source of the translation is irrelevant?!"
The source of all information is everything if you want to print with authority; the paper must depend on source everyday. Is that the end of the story there? Unbelievable . . .

Unfortunately, it begins and ends with the team/organization and how they handle credentials and access to the team.
 
As Conway said, most newspapers won’t give any credit to blogs because they are infact in competition with them, so it will be up to the organization whether or not anything changes.

Having been on the flip side though, it is hard to pick and choose which sites to credential. How do you pick one site over another? Some of the issues I use to encounter was….Which site has the highest number of visitors? Are these numbers just self-reported or is there a neutral, third party source that’s providing the data. Do any of these bloggers actually have a degree in journalism?

Just some of the things to sift through and it’s not easy….

Bloggers don’t get a lot of respect because most of them are merely commenting on news items produced by major news sources (league info, other sportswriters, team publicity announcements, etc.). Few of them are out there establishing valid reasons for why they should exist; most indulge in unrealistic speculation without offering new analysis or other ways of viewing the sports they purport to cover. For every site like Gabe Desjardins’ Behind the Net, there are 50 blogs like Eklund or Two Line Pass that simply deal in bullshit out there. Even mediocre blogs like Puck Daddy offer more balance than the slew of team-oriented blogs, which are usually written by intelligent homer fans whose perceptions are always colored by the fact that they love their team and hate most of the other teams in the league. To quote the movie Miller’s Crossing—it’s a question of ethics, and the nature of sportswriting in the mainstream press can make a more convincing case for maintaining analytical distance from the teams they cover than your average blog or blogger because of that.

In the world of hockey coverage there are many blogs that legitimately rival mainstream press sportswriters in terms of their ability to write and think about the game of hockey. But indulging in the type of campaign that PPP did after catching somebody in the act of plagiarizing them comes off as childish rather than ethical in its appearance. Of course the Toronto Sun was in the wrong here, but much of what bloggers do is media-derived criticism. They need to break more news themselves and stop using major media sources as a jumping-off point for their own ideas and passing that off as journalism, and perhaps then they will receive the respect that they are due.

Remember, however, that the piles of poorly-written blogs out there on the internet do more damage to the profession of blogger than plagiarism does…..

I don’t claim to know anything about the readership of the Toronto Sun specifically, but take solace in the fact that, generally speaking, print media is on the decline.

Well I’m a firm believer in giving credit where credit is due. That’s why I think there should be some sort of unity among all of the SB Nation Blog sites to gang up and make a ruckus about this. Even if this one goes unnoticed, they will think twice next time they try and pull that type of trash. It kind of makes me sick. All they had to do was say was picked up from Toronto Sun by way of SBNation.com or something to that effect. If TSN actually picked it up they should be more cognoscente of where they get their information from.

First let me state that I don’t think any intellectual property should ever be used without proper citation. I hail from a scientific background and similar actions in that context are dealt with quite promptly and severely.

However, calling the Toronto Suns’ actions pathetic and characterizing the organization as “Unprofessional, unclassy, and pure disrespect [sic]” is going much too far.

On August 12th, you yourself posted an article concerning Marc Staal’s value. In it you said “First and foremost, last season he was statistically the best defensive defensemen in the National Hockey League – that is special in itself.” This is an uncited use of ideas from an article from journalist James Mirtle of The Globe and Mail.

I’m sure there are more such instances to be found, but one example is enough.

As basement mothers often say, “those who live in glass houses, should not throw stones.” And you are indeed being incredibly hypocritical.

Furthermore, your article is rife with grammatical errors and awkward diction. If you are going to attack a journalistic body on the main page of this site, you should try to at least match their standards for writing. Perhaps if you are writing angrily and hastily, take a step back before publishing or find a proofreader.