German press recycling: first paper, now content

Wait a second, didn't they publish this article about a woman dreaming of Los Angeles earlier?

Click, check the publishing date. Today, but that's wrong, I remember seeing this a couple of weeks ago.

Are you sure?

Thus began an exploration of the re-use of prior articles in the German media. Look, they have always done this. How much new content can you write about Easter eggs, or about planting lettuce or growing tomatoes?

Or about what we called the yuck fest subjects in an earlier post, the large group of annual "bacteria on your smartphone, tablet, keyboard, toilet seat...and so on"?
When you write about a scientific subject, isn't it reasonable it won't change within a few weeks?
Take today's offending re-jigged piece from Spiegel Online about mysterious rubber-like plates inscribed "Tjipetir" washing up on British beaches. They went over board, float around the high seas for a hundred years and wash up on a beach in a storm.

Don't we have whole segments of the media hardly doing anything but recycled content, with different names, different size breasts, different affairs but otherwise utterly interchangeable?  Aren't the big religions eternal content recycling institutions?

What's so bad about writing about the same topic multiple times, it happens right here on this blog, too?

The big difference is that we add the note "re-post from" and the date when we notify the world via Twitter. And we do not go back and copy and past a post into a blank editor window to pass it off as a new post.

Sure, sure, blame the content management software. It automatically adds the date and the time, and you can't do anything about it, sure.

The old media are still trying to figure out how to survive in the digital age, cut them some slack.

Was the same argument made in favor of, say, wheelrights, when wooden wheels were made obsolete by technological progress?

Did Mr. Gutenberg, the man of the printing press, voice an opinion on the relative importance of wheelrights versus scribes?

Just don't mess with the time stamp. You can safely assume people will forget and eventually read that article again anyway.