Mashable

Although Mashable is a site I read religiously and link to frequently, I think Louis Gray's point is fair and well made:

Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz

In the tech blogosphere, there's a clear delineation between those who are actively creating the news (the developers, engineers, and business people), those who are reporting the news (those blogs who follow journalism standards and do actual reporting) and those who simply follow along - either by referencing other people's work, or simply duplicating it. Mashable, billing itself as the #1 social networking news site on the Web, falls almost exclusively in that third camp.

Over the last few weeks, I've been at times shaking my head as I've seen the site's reporters deliver an absolute minimum of original reporting, underdeliver on giving credit to those finding the news first, and in one blatant example, stealing quotes from a story I had written, without giving attribution, and not making edits when notified.

Mashable is one of the big names in the blogosphere, ranking #8 overall, according to Technorati. The site has achieved this ranking through an army of reporters who deliver a high number of stories around the clock. While the stories themselves don't often gain a high number of comments, and don't usually offer new information that couldn't be found elsewhere on the Web, the sheer volume has made them a must-subscribe tech news filter for many subscribed to their RSS feed. (Myself included)

Due to Mashable's popularity, the site very often gains credit for finding a story, when in fact it was almost always found first somewhere else. And the site's design and story templates favor giving the original source of the story as little credit as possible - often tucked away, so well-meaning repeaters of Mashable's news miss it altogether.

Read more here.

Comments

[Tim]

Peter,

I 100% agree with you/louis on all fronts. We are a new startup that released a basic preview of our site so we could get some feedback from our users. We have a loads of features coming up and someone must have submitted us to Mashable.

Instead of asking us what we were doing, they simply wrote an inaccurate, unbaised and unfair article and now we have to live with there high pagerank whenever anyone searches for us.

I have tried writing to them to ask them to review the story - but never get a response. I wrote about it on my blog here -
http://tinyurl.com/yuv8tg

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

T.

[Sueblimely]

I often use Mashable as a way of finding what is new or finding lists of resources. Because it does not tell me the details I want to know, I only use it as a starting point for further research. Mashable is still a good source of basic information.

Even if I do find a more original source of news of a new resource, as Peter says, the author, in the haste to be the first to break the story, has often not taken the time for research or trials.

Mashable were to credit the original news submitters this is not necessarily going to give us accurate information - in fact some blog authors report negatively purely to gain attention and readers.

Mashable would be much more valuable if it always pointed to balanced reviews by reputable, knowledgeable sources.