Our Excerpting Policy
Standards about "fair" excerpting of online content are still evolving, and different sites have different policies. Recent high-profile cases like GateHouse suing the New York Times and the Chicago Reader blasting Huffington Post have brought the issue front and center. (Brian Stelter discusses the issue in today's New York Times.)
Based on our experience as readers, writers, and editors, we think that fair online excerpting is--and should be--viewed differently than "fair use" in offline media. Specifically, we think that as publishers recognize the value of having their content quoted, debated, discussed, and linked to throughout the blogosphere, they become less concerned about the number of words or paragraphs in any particular except. (We certainly have.)
The vast majority of publishers already feel this way. We have been publishing for 20 months now--more than 25,000 posts--and we have been asked to shorten excerpts only twice. (We did so immediately.) Similarly, we have had our own stuff excerpted very liberally, by thousands of sites, and only in the egregious case described below--the automatic republishing of our entire, full-text RSS feed--have we kicked up a fuss. A few publishers are still focused on word count, however, so it makes sense to discuss this publicly.
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Yes, now on the Internet steal content very quickly …