Tech PR & Blogging — Take Care With “Re-purposed” Content
Posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
As the latest jobless recovery takes shape, media departments are hearing the familiar “do more with less” mantra from on high. With fewer bodies to produce the content that execs demand, the temptation to “re-purpose” old material is strong. The trouble is, you can’t steal — not even from yourself.
Crawford produces a huge amount of content for our clients: bylines, blogs, white papers, speeches, presentations, marketing collateral, op eds, letters to the editor — you name it. We have one Iron Rule about content: Every piece must be fresh and original. Occasional use of source material is fine as long as the reference is brief and the author of the borrowed idea is given full credit.
Here’s a conundrum: When content is produced as a “work for hire” and purchased by the client, can they do whatever they want with it? That’s a trick question. The answer depends on how and by whom the content is used. Here are guidelines that may help when you face this issue.
- Bylines Belong to the Publication. If you pitch and place a bylined article with a media outlet, it belongs to them unless you negotiate the right to re-use the identical content. You may not reprint it without permission. You most certainly may not offer the same piece to another publication.
- Guest Blogs Must Follow Copyright Laws. Editors want fresh content. If the guest executive blog you’ve promised them has already appeared on your web site, make sure the editor knows that, to avoid any potential conflict with or later embarrassment to the editor. If the blog you write appears first on a publication’s site, regular copyright rules apply — the piece belongs to the media outlet.
- Re-Purpose Means Rewrite — Not Re-Title. Merely slapping a new headline on old content doesn’t make it new. If a piece has great ideas worth repeating for new audiences, then it’s also worth doing a fresh take on the content from the standpoint of those readers.
- Never Steal Someone Else’s Content. You’ll get caught for sure. Placing a new byline on somebody else’s content is the worst editorial sin of all — even if the client owns the content.
A few years ago a British PR agency that supports one of our clients in Europe ran afoul of these rules. The agency was lifting, in toto, bylined articles already published in the U.S. on the client’s behalf, substituting European executives’ names for the original U.S. authors’ — and pitching these pieces to UK-based media. When the client discovered what was going on and confronted the agency, the account rep’s attitude was: “Hey, what’s the harm? Who will ever know?”
Here is the harm.
In the Internet era, media is not confined by national boundaries, and hasn’t been for many years. In the tech arena particularly, English is the new lingua franca, and U.S.-based media dominate. When a story appears online in a prominent tech trade, it likely has as many readers in Mumbai, Bonn, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and London as in New York, Seattle or Silicon Valley. If the same story appears twice under different names or titles, then readers — and the authorities — will be all over it immediately. International copyright laws apply in most countries. But even if there were no such laws, would you want to risk incensing an editor by tricking him into using content already published by another, or to lose credibility with your audiences due to such buffoonery? Of course not.
So. . .how did I take the news that content developed for the client was appearing in multiple countries under different names? It stopped me cold. It’s a sad comment on the state of the media world when agencies, whose principle job is to create and place fresh content for clients, pilfer others’ work and don’t even know that’s wrong.
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