Romenesko resigns from Poynter

Poynter reports that Jim Romenesko has resigned from his long-running series of daily online reports about the business and culture of news. Apparently this was the result of some kind of weird conflict over attribution in his posts. I don't really get it, but I have long been a fan of his pioneering style of short-form news aggregation, and I don't understand why he was made to feel unwelcome at Poynter after 12 long years of great work. There's a New York Times interview here.

In an interview this summer, Mr. Romenesko, 58, described how he was looking forward to leaving aggregation behind to get back to reporting, the reason he became a journalist in the first place. His new site, JimRomenesko.com, will still cover media but will also touch on other topics he is interested in, like food, finance and real estate. “I’m not going to be doing three-sentence summaries of other people’s work. That’s behind me,” he said in the summer.

UPDATE: Choire's post is the must-read. Romenesko's blog started in *1999*, man. And the old format worked great. Sometimes, it's best not to mess with what works.

• [Glenn Fleishman]

  Apparently, his editors at Poynter never read his posts nor the articles to which he links, otherwise his perfectly transparent style of paraphrasing and excerpting from the destination would be crystal clear to them. His style was never to present himself as the source of the words used in his preview (unless he was doing reportage, a recent change).

  • [Brian Van Nieuwenhoven]

    Well, it’s apparent that this Julie Moos character was simply out to get him for whatever reason. All of her actions in the last 48 hours are decidedly one-sided and unnecessarily vicious. She’s a real winner! I’m sure all of his readers will stick with her. ::chuckle::

• [Xeni Jardin]

  Yes.

• [Maddy]

  wifey, serious journo exec, LOVES Romensko … turned me on to it … this sounds like a corpo fuster cluck to me …

• [BarBarSeven]

  Now Poynter is free to do whatever else Poynter does… Wait, what else do they do other than provide a platform for Jim Romenesko?

• [GlenBlank]

  That is genuinely bizarre.

  The man writes “The paper said…” followed by what the paper actually said…

  …and that’s somehow a problem?

  Heck, the problem I usually have is people who write “GlenBlank said…” followed by some creatively inaccurate paraphrase of what I actually said… and then berate me for what their idiotic paraphrase says.

  But, hey, at least they aren’t plagiarizing me, huh?  That must be the ethical way to do it, huh?  

  Just too weird for words.  Upside-Down-Backward World at its most absurd.

• [Halloween_Jack]

  So, let me get this straight. This internet company, which sounds like any random internet company in the world with their business-speak, decides, after this guy has been doing what he’s been doing for twelve years (which, in internet years, dates him back to the reign of Henry V), that what he’s doing is all wrong, despite the fact that none of the sources that he’s quoted without using quotation marks has ever complained, as far as I can tell. Is that about right?

• [Mack Reed]

  Poynter is a revered and valuable journalism think-tank, founded by an equally revered and valuable newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times (full disclosure – the Times fired me once a million years ago at a time when I probably deserved it, but it has done and continues to do some of the nation’s best investigative reporting). 

  But it’s precisely this kind of pencil-necked pedantry - ”Oh, that’s not *real* journalism, and never will be” - that allowed the vast bulk of American newspapers to dismiss the internet until they found (too late) that it had not only eaten their lunch, breakfast, dinner and midnight snacks, but also begun stripping all the valuables and copper piping out of their very houses. 

  Reading between the lines, it looks as though Romenesko’s “crime” was “discovered” after “years” and Poynter suddenly got a bug up its ass. 

  Rather than simply forbid him to keep operating the way they had sanctioned but failed to notice, Poynter abruptly pushed him out – and lost their greatest voice and marketing asset.

  Pathetic case of embarrassed revenge, sounds like.

• [GlenBlank]

  Actually, no, they didn’t ‘abruptly push him out.’  He had recently announced that he plans to ‘semi-retire’ at the end of the year – leave Poynter, and open his own site dedicated to original reporting  - since he’s gotten bored with doing nothing but aggregating.

  And THEN they discovered his “pattern of incomplete attribution.”  (Well, actually, *they* didn’t discover it; it was pointed out to them by an intern at Columbia Journalism Review.)

  So, after he announces his intention to leave and create a (possibly) competing product, they suddenly discover – after twelve years – that he’s not ‘meeting their high standards of journalism.’

  And, instead of saying, hey, Jim, dude – use some quotation marks – that’s our house style – they make it a big public row.

  I’m always reluctant to impute motive – but this looks pretty dubious to me.

  • [Mack Reed]

    I hadn’t been following the issue until it hit last night. God. This sounds like far worse behavior on Poynter’s part than what I had assumed.