note: sorry about the varying fonts, copy and paste issues
A day or two ago, I commented on a story by Owen Good on Kotaku. It was the one about the woman who held her piss to win a Wii for a radio station competition. There were new developments in the story, and Owen Good reported on them. He got his information from an article in the L.A. Times, and linked to it at the bottom of his article. I read it, and I found that it was strangely similar to Owen's article. It seemed to me that he just rephrased it and rearranged it. I commented "Owen Good certainly knows how to rehash a story". Owen responded "ErgoProxy77 certainly knows how to get himself banned". He banned me from commenting on Kotaku. I emailed him about this, and told him I had lost respect for him as a journalist. He followed up and said: " You so completely misunderstand what we do as a blog — which is to legitimately aggregate news from other sources in addition to our own original reporting — that I can say your presence as a commenter and a reader adds nothing and won't be missed.". I then emailed him back saying "Hmmm, and I was taught journalists should be able to handle criticism". He responded " I can handle legitimate criticism. I'm not going to let uninformed cheap shots go unanswered, nor am I going to sit for an uncredentialed journalism lecture from someone who doesn't know a fucking thing about the subject." I then told him that I am a journalism student at Carleton University. I don't know everything about journalism, but I do know a rehashed story when I see one. His last reply was " I have a master of science from Columbia. I'm pretty sure I know, and have done, much more than you. You confuse your role as a reader with the right to lecture me as my editor.". My final email to him was this:
"I'm not lecturing you at all, I was just voicing my opinion, something I have trouble doing now with people like you who ban people because you disagree with them."
What do you think about this? Am I being a bit of a jerk? Was he wrong to ban me? Please comment!
Update
Here is an email Owen Good sent back to me today:Let's get back to the original source of the trouble: Your completely uninformed criticism of the post.
What I did, young man, was to read, rewrite, add context, opinion and literary color to — and most importantly, credit another news organization so that my readership could be informed of something they would find interesting but might otherwise miss. Not every reader of a publication with a mandate as specific as Kotaku's — video games — is also a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times.
In no sense of the word did I ever represent the Los Angeles Times' story as my own. Your sneering allegation that what I wrote was a "rehash" is a cheapshot from someone out to prove he knows more than the rest of the world.
The dirty secret here is that news aggregation is practiced by all sorts of mass media. Blogs didn't invent it. I'm sure from your perch as a know-it-all undergraduate journalism student with six clips in the student paper, I'm worse than a plagiarist because everything I write isn't pure, down to the preposition, and originally reported.
But this is the world of the media that is out there. It is legitimate. It is professional. And just because I displeased you with something I wrote does not legitimize your completely unfounded and insulting attack on my credibility.
You have a tremendous amount to learn, young man, and you need to deepen your understanding of journalism beyond the echo chamber of whatever it is you're reading in the Internet commenting threads that support your utterly deformed expectations of the world.
I'm sure your professors are delighted to have you in class.
OSG
Update #2
I emailed Brian Crescente and linked to this blog post. He said I broke the rules and that's why I was banned. However, I can just make a new account, so they can't really stop me from commenting!
Here is the email:
Commenting on Kotaku is in many ways a right. We try to cut out the unrelated name-calling and finger-pointing, no matter who it is directed at, so people can carry on thoughtful discussions on the topic at hand.
In this case you were posting about Owen, not about the subject of his article. Disagreeing with the an editor in a post on the topic that they wrote about will never get you banned, just go look at our threads, almost all of them include plenty of arguments against what a writer is saying.
Save the unrelated accusations and writer critiques for an open thread or the Talk Amongst Yourselves posts.
Hopes that helps you understand.
Thanks,
Brian
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