Thursday, October 12, 2006

Innovation, borrowing, poaching or plagiarism? Entirely unrelated to my update to yesterday's post... I've belatedly noticed that Jay Small posted a couple of links related to an e-mail question I sent him last month. The topic is "borrowing" visual design elements or ideas, such as these take-offs on a designer's use of a cigarette company's "look." In my online journalism class, I've been looking at students' first weblog comments on news sites, and have been explaining that it's fair use to take a snapshot of a website's home page and comment on it, but not to lift a dramatic AP photograph just to comment on how it was or wasn't used by one news site or another. Meanwhile, it's nice to see that The Los Angeles Times apparently isn't getting any complaints from The New York Times for calling its research into news innovations "The Manhattan Project." The right-coast Times quotes the publisher of the left-coast Times saying the Manhattan Project name "captures the sense of significance and urgency that I think is altogether called for." Says The New York Times, "The name refers, of course, to the American effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II, an-exaggerated-for-effect overstatement of the problems facing ink-on-paper newspapers: declining circulation, stagnant ad revenues and rising costs. "While visits to newspaper Web sites are increasing, they account for a small part of revenue and do not draw enough advertising to support newsroom operations." Puns on the words "bomb" and "fallout" are very tempting. 5:52:27 PM    comment []

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