[beejiu]

The context is that Google has a new "Site reputation abuse" policy that some argue isn't applied fairly between small sites and massive media sites. The policy states:

"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site."

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.

[kube-system]

> That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.

I think a much more simple answer is that syndication has always been hush-hush because branding and brand trust is a key part of media marketing. Your local newspaper in the 90s had a ton of syndicated stories too but it was all published under your local paper's hometown moniker.

[donavanm]

I literally worked for a “home town” newspaper in the 90s and knight ridder in the early 2000s. This is not in any way comparable to syndication. Syndicated stories have an accurate byline, the publishing paper paid for syndication/content, advertising is not involved in syndicated content, and the costs are not tied to duping end readers.

Moreso this (at the time) was literal school content on media literacy. High school english classes would _get newspapers_ in order to talk about the different types of articles and content.

[wbl]

Every syndicated story had a byline indicating syndication.

[kube-system]

Major US newspapers in the 21st century did. But regardless, many of them were opaque in nature. "Via AP" may check the box of attribution but is lost on a reader of average literacy.

[xbar]

Newswires were well understood entities for all newspaper readers for more than 100 years.

[sokoloff]

That’s giving an awful lot of credit to “all newspaper readers” there.

Certainly as a kid/teen, I didn’t understand it; I suspect plenty of adults didn’t either.

[x0x0]

This was not used to commingle authority vs the stories they reported themselves, and is in no way comparable to what cnn is doing, ie leveraging their site rank to juice traffic to trash content for ad dollars.

[hedora]

Yeah; and they were generally extremely high quality.

[mike50]

40 years ago maybe. Now it's written to a 5th grade level and bloated with explain like I'm five filler.

[refulgentis]

I wonder about the relationship between those two, column attribution in 90s newspapers doesn't have much to say about the incentive to stay quiet to avoid publicly announcing you're violating Google's rules in 2024.

That aside, I'm not sure the assertion about 90s papers is accurate. There was syndication, of course, but that was attributed. Let's say there were articles written by other people published under the names of local writers. That sounds theoretically possible, but something that'd be well known. Let's say there were articles attributed to the paper at large. I don't recall that.

[kube-system]

Syndicated material was disguised all the time. Ask most people and they think that most of the stories in their local newspaper are written by people that work there.

> The average American reader didn’t necessarily notice the way syndicates and chains had come to dominate the news. Syndicates were careful to sell their material to only one newspaper per city. While syndicated features usually carried a small copyright symbol, the name that followed that symbol could be deliberately opaque. Readers wouldn’t automatically know that “King Features” denoted Hearst material, or that “NEA” indicated content from the Scripps chain. Local papers sometimes purposely disguised syndicated material. The Milwaukee Sentinel bought a comic strip from the New York World syndicate in 1918, for example, but retitled it “Somewhere in Milwaukee.” The same paper told readers to send in their letters for Dorothy Dix as though she could be reached in Milwaukee, and not in New York City, where she lived and sold her work to the Ledger syndicate.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-syndicated-column...

Local newspapers didn't want to plainly advertise that a gigantic chunk of their content came from thousands of miles away. It undermines their value proposition.

Likewise, CNN probably likes that a huge chunk of featured content on their page is driving them revenue but doesn't look like a big ad to their audience.

[hedora]

That might have been true in the early days of the telegraph, but for as long as I can remember (and up until we cancelled our subscription), the bylines in our local paper were extremely clear on this point. Anything that was not local had a byline with the name of the reporter, their city, and “via Associated Press”, or similar.

[ghaff]

I was a longtime newspaper person and I agree that things like AP attribution were generally pretty clear. I doubt the average reader noticed.

[rightbyte]

I don't think the news wires fooled people into believing their local paper had journalist present covering the election in Mozambique.

There was no name underneath the short. Just AP, Reuters or whatever. It was pretty clear.

[kube-system]

"King Features" in the above quote is a contemporary example. Regardless, my point is not that these syndications are impossible to identify (as is the same with CNN's featured links), but that they are similarly opaque. Syndication as a concept isn't something that is obvious to a person of average media literacy, and neither is a tiny byline that states "via AP".

[refulgentis]

To me, it's clear that is attribution, and not attributing, or actively misattributing via signing your brand to other companies output, is the key to the article.

[hamilton1232]

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[grues-dinner]

Also for non-print media, famously exemplified by Sinclair and This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5mlx_DnIEo