And I get quoted!
Diebold Coughs Up Cash in Copyright Case!
It’s always nice when papers just print your press release verbatim… what disturbs me is the thought that perhaps papers carry verbatim press releases from less scrupulous people and treat them as stories written by reporters. What does “By IPR” in this article mean? Whoever IPR is, I don’t think they wrote the EFF’s press release. I’m stumped. It appears that they’ve basically subscribed to the EFF’s press release page, which is awesome, because these issues never receive as much mainstream attention as they ought to. I guess we must just have an EFF supporter on the newspaper staff in Millinocket, ME.
independent press release?
As the resident Newspaper Guy, I should point out that newspapers rarely do this *just* because they’re lazy; they do have people whose job it is to do the necessary research to make these decisions. You get these IPR (independent press release) stories when it’s a relatively uncontroversial and interesting news item that the press release gives verifiable facts for and doesn’t editorialize on, but the paper doesn’t think they have anything to gain by writing their own story on it — they don’t care enough to want to use their own labor to get their own quotes and their own facts and probably not really discover anything new.
Generally really big papers will have the resources to get someone to slap together their own paraphrase of the event regardless, but smaller papers take what they can get.