Are You Credited For Every News Story?
Advertising is a great way to sell a product and news is a very good and useful tool to sell news to the masses. Everyone loves advertising and if there were no advertising people wouldn’t read the news or watch any news programs. But when the media tells us something is news it’s usually not news at all, but advertising dressed up in the name of news. Just consider all those lists of companies who are said to be “Informationally Advanced” by having their brand logos seen on numerous products, as a very small percentage of them are in fact in any way advanced. Advertising is good and helps raise brand awareness to a high degree, but the real news isn’t in the advertising, it’s news that the advertising was placed in the wrong place. Most of the products advertised aren’t news at all, they’re just marketing disguised as news.
One good example is a new media release, which may well have originated from a local radio station or newspaper. The words of the news release are nothing more than a re-hash of the same old news, with some details changing for the sake of repetition. Often times this re-hashed news release will appear in multiple places around the Internet and be cited as original work. While that may sound like fun, what’s news to one person is apparently news to everybody else and certainly nobody’s going to cite something you wrote as original when it comes to news of the day. In truth original news-making material is so rare and valuable that only those with exceptional talents can possibly make it mainstream.
The next time you read a news release and the words news are used to think about all those other things that were news that was not news. How many other words describing the same event were repeated throughout the release? How many times the words news was repeated were altered? Did the writer of the news release, take time to check all those facts before including them in the news media release? Chances are the answer is no, and that the news media release is probably not original and in fact may be copied from an online article.