The more you are willing to accept responsibility for your actions, the more credibility you will have. ~ Brian Koslow

I always used to believe that some, if not most part of a news story is manipulated. If it’s on television the motive is to have higher TRP and if it’s not Newspaper, it’s for revenues through advertisement. However, I never thought that News Paper sites will start scraping the content just to get readership and to click online ads.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the era where high profile websites are not even finding time to check the originality and credibility of news they publish. I had high regards for Times of India (I am not sure to give a link to this site) but I noticed that they publish articles which are scraped. As a proof you might want to perform a snippet search for the article at:

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/msid-2795173.cms (No hard link again)

You’ll notice that though the motive is good, but the means is bad. They are scrapping the description of addons for Firefox from various places. It doesn’t matter if the addons are almost No Central Authority (NCA) but no one gives the right for at least a news paper site to publish scrapped articles. The responsibility lies with the site to provide original content even though the article might be published by some part time journalist.

P.S. Times of India is a leading news paper in India and the site is one of the most popular news portal in the country.