Archive for May 31st, 2008

Flare Magazine: Old Media Copying Stories From New Media

Published by Babar Bhatti on May 31, 2008 under Telecommunications

Flare Magazine, Islamabad based technology magazine, is known to copy and paste articles from the cyberspace. Now it has also started stealing content and headlines from blogs such as this one and others. If you look at the stories in Flare you will find that most (if not all) of them do not cite any references. Well, there are no authors as well. This is not limited to Flare, other news publishers seem to be doing the same. This shows the sad state of affairs for old media in Pakistan. The quality of reporting has been steadily going down but it has reached a new low with the stealing of content. If left unchekced, this will lead the next generation to think that it is ok to plagiarize and sell.

I am surprised that the telecommunication companies who place their ads in Flare Magazine are either unaware or oblivious of this parctice of old media copying stories from new media. I hope that they have some standards for the publications where their name appears!

To illustrate, see these stories from Flare’s May 15 – June 15 edition (25MB pdf).

1. Pakistan’s Telecom Industry: Is the honeymoon over? Originally published at Pakistaniat.com
Here’s the copy as it appears in Flare.

 2. Here are 2 posts from TelecomPk.net: Calls to Pakistan Made Expensive and Is Pakistan ready for 3G?

 I hope that there will be enough awareness and concern from the public to discourage this practice and get journalism back on track.

Thanks to Saleem Khan for informing me about this.