Couple days ago I saw a report regarding online copyright infringement on local news in Lebanon. It is true that in Lebanon, once one of the news outlets publish a certain post, all other sites seem to jump on the bandwagon and publish the same content without rephrasing or sourcing the initial site and getting away due to lack of digital copyright laws. Copying online content is a case also happening among international websites but with subtle signs of plagiarism.
I do know that once an incident occurs around the world, all news outlets will be covering that specific story. But what is actually funny is that even the type of stories that are not “happening-now” are being copied from one news site to another not only locally but even among international news.
For example, The story of the little pocket on our jeans was published on cosmopolitan.co.uk on 25 January 2016 and then the same topic circulated on News.com.au & huffingtonpost.com on 26 January, businessinsider.com on February 1, independent.co.uk on February 22.
It also didn’t take the local news in Lebanon and Arabic websites few days or hours to pick up the HOT topic and post about it. Lahamag.com published the story on 24 January, alaantv.com on January 25, mtv.com.lb on January 27, 2016.
Couple months ago, a Lebanese Blogger, Jed Ismael, made it to international news for a post he published about Instagram porn hidden under Arabic hashtags. His post never made it to local news in Lebanon back then, not even any other Arabic news site, not until his post was featured later on international news like thesun.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, The Time of India Tech, News.com.au, International Business Times and many others.
Which shows that even when local news has topics to publish about locally, publishers aren’t really doing proper research to publish their own news but rather translating or copying stories.
I believe there’s lots of really good content that is being published locally and are worth highlighting by local news, rather than just copying/translating what publishers post around the world on a daily basis.