On the first freelance writing job that I took, I was given a list of topics I could write about. The topics were very specific, and as it turns out they were lifted off existing articles that had come out in the past couple of days. I was then "encouraged" to collect three links about this topic, then rewrite them into my own article to submit for publication. Welcome to the world of SEO Content Mills. I have to say, I was very disillusioned by this -- I signed up for a creative writing job, not a creative copying job. I mean, we are copywriters, but that's not what I had in mind when I say I am a copywriter. It sort of made me realize that the news sites around the web all just copy content off each other, and I got depressed for a while. Has anyone else had this experience? Or do you think this is okay and a reputable practice? Which news sites do not do this? I'd like to follow some. Or work for some, if they exist.
First off, copywriting is the creation of marketing content, not news writing. Putting that aside, most news sites syndicate: they get their content from the big news sources (AP, Reuters, etc.) and syndicate it out to their readership. That's how it's always worked. But your experience of content mills is pretty standard. That's what they do: they generate piles of SEO content to attract traffic. In the news industry, there isn't really much else you can do unless you employ your own journalists for local stories - in the end, the big news is the same, regardless of where you find it. It's just more noticeable because there are so many small sites spewing the same content in the hopes of grabbing 12c of AdSense revenue. Plus, of course, the Daily Fail... er... Mail is notorious for doing exactly the same thing on a gigantic, national scale, without any fact-checking, sense of journalistic responsibility or ethics, as far as I can see.
I see. I realize that big news is the same, and the facts won't change. However, I saw a lot of articles during the time I did this, and I would get 5-10 articles on the same topic and as I read through them, you could tell they were all the same ideas, just reworded and/or rearranged. Some of them were even the same word for word in a paragraph, but the paragraph in one would be at the start, on the other it was at the end. It was disgusting. I won't name drop (Daily Fail is it? Hehe) but I read some of those news sites! I was so disillusioned.
As you can notice in the web lots of big news are re-written in different angles and almost duplicated that's why 20 to 25% in the internet field are duplicated. You need to be creative and diversify your ideas to generate a unique story related to the main content.
@KylieSweet Matt Cutts posted a video on webmasters group on 2013 regarding duplicate content (20 to 25% ) now(in 2016) i can smell that it may raised up to 70% (Gurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) not only in news sites, consider any domain / industry / technology / out of the globe ---- its completely occupied by this (F..........) duplicate content. Truly tired of all these raising stufff....
I didn't realise how bad the situation was until I started freelance writing. Most new sites, bar the most prestigious news companies, do nothing but rewriting and SEO. All those cat videos, funny news etc...horrible shite. That doesn't mean you need to follow in their shoes. Don't copy/rewrite articles, use them as research and do an original article based on that. Personally I have always, always hated repeating myself. Be that in a piece of text or when talking to someone. Causes endless problems in personal life(try living with a woman and refusing to repeat what you just said), but it does make writing a lot easier.
People tend to keep doing what they have been doing along, simply because it is cheaper for them to do so. They are afraid of buying unique content which add up fast, and they would not be able to keep up in huge demand. If you ask me, I think one good written unique article is probably worth more then 1000 spun. I guess they are afraid if they invest in real content, then adsense would only be .15cents so they continue to buy the cheapy links, and cheapy content.... then in six months, they have moved on because google tanked their site.
news sites are the source of the content, and everyone downstream is just showing duplicate content. i guess google thinks the entire planet should just go to the source for news. after all, why run a wanna be news site when you can just turn on CNN....
And here you have the reason why I write all of my articles. In 99% of the time if you hire someone else, especially in this domain they will do a crappy job and will only spin some articles. The news websites are even worse, they don`t even waste time to modify the articles, they just copy them without any shame. This is the IM world now, but don`t get discouraged, you should even be happy, because if there are many people using shady tactics, the rest of use will have better results in Google. They are shooting themselves in the foot.
Yes. I have same experience with a local news site. Mostly, news sites need a lot of journalists. But the low budget is the barrier to get thousands of quality journalists. So they copy news from others. But this is not the good tactic. So, I think a news site owner should fix proper budget before launching a news site.
Fact of the matter is, news sites kinda have to copy each other, by their very definition. Reporting on the news means reporting on actual events that occurred, meaning everyone is reporting on the same thing, and there are only so many ways to report on a certain issue. True, sometimes you get different perspectives based on the news outlet's political leanings, but if they're doing their job right, they still should be reporting about and interpreting the same base set of facts as everyone else.
Yes, that is common sense and logical. The problem is when websites literally copy word for word articles from other sources
I feel this is mainly a symptom of the internet. The immediacy demanded by the internet creates an impossible standard which just can't be upheld with original content...
One of the problems of a good text in the internet is necessary keys for SEO...usually it spoils a normal text.
Seems like all Daily News Site copy each others news and replace few things or rewrite them with standard writers and publish them on there websites. They usually gets popular because people likes reading there news and most of the news are of no use and old.