Gawker: At Huffington Post, ‘rewrites in the mold of Lee’s Ad Age post abound’

Gawker / Adweek
Gawker’s Ryan Tate calls The Huffington Post’s suspension of writer Amy Lee for over-aggregating an Ad Age post “ridiculous, given HuffPo’s systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people’s news articles.” He cites other Huffington stories that he says take the same approach and quotes an anonymous former Huffington employee who says such rewriting is “what we were taught and told to do.” But Huffington Post Executive Business Editor Peter Goodman tells Adweek’s Dylan Byers that the post would have been acceptable as a “link out”: a short introduction with a link to the original post. “This piece read like it was a fully developed piece,” he said. “We’re about to have a newsroom wide meeting to talk about precisely what to do when we’re aggregating, and what not to do, and to remind everyone that we’re making a serious investment here in original reporting, and our aggregation has to be a form of original reporting.” Further discussions of aggregation practices, including comparisons to pornography and DUI, in the Adweek post.