CNN and Mashable? Welcome to Web journalism’s end days

Need another sign that the 2012 Mayan apocalypse is right on track? Reuters TV reporter Felix Salmon claims that CNN is about to buy popular Web news site Mashable for the not inconsiderable sum of $200 million.

As a source of breaking news, Mashable is better called “Rehashable.” On the scale of groundbreaking journalism, it lands somewhere between the Frostbite Falls Picayune Intelligence and “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.”

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For example, as I write this the lead story on Mashable is “iPad Shipping Time Now 2 to 3 Weeks.” It seems the author of this incisive 142-word report visited Apple’s iPad page, found the words “Available to ship in 2 to 3 weeks,” and voilà — instant blog post.

At press time that post has been tweeted 1,128 times. It’s been “liked” on Facebook by 52 people and shared on StumbleUpon by 110 others. Nobody has yet built a Pinterest board about it, but that’s only a matter of time.

At least you could call that story original reporting. The No. 2 story on Mashable at this moment is “Facebook Outs Suspected Bigamist Leading Double Life.” That story builds on a report from Associated Press published in the Washington Post about a gentleman in Seattle named Alan L. O’Neill (formerly Alan Fulk) who got busted for having two wives at the same time when Facebook suggested that wife No. 1 befriend wife No. 2.

The author of this 256-word story also apparently Googled “Facebook bigamist” and came up with a 2010 story from MSNBC about another couple that suffered a similar fate. He mentioned a widely quoted stat about how often social media is used in divorce cases. That’s the extent of the report.

I’d pay $200 million for that. Wouldn’t you?

Now, I wouldn’t want these bloggers’ jobs. If I had to to churn out a dozen posts a day, I’d probably be copying recipes and reprinting them as breaking trend stories (“Seattle Couple Discovers Delicious Yet Nutritious Ways to Stretch Their Grocery Budget”).

But that is the point of sites like Mashable and its spiritual brethren the Huffington Post: Crank out as much crap as quickly as you can and grab those Internet eyeballs before someone else does. In the Facebook bigamy story, at least HuffPo ran the original AP report instead of a watered-down summary. Now that Arianna is a mainstream media mogul with $315 million in her and her investors’ pockets, she’s trying hard to be respectable.

What is CNN getting out of its alleged investment in Mashable? Eyeballs. And maybe some street cred from the Web 2.0 crowd, though I doubt that will stick for very long. There is something to be said for the ability to drive traffic to your news site, but it should never be confused with the notion that quality journalism has anything to do with it.

Interestingly, at around the same time as news of the alleged CNN-Mashable mashup broke at South by Southwest (SXSW), author Maria Popova announced The Curator’s Code, an attempt to formalize the way websites give credit to original sources of material.

Popova and her designer partner Kelli Anderson want to propagate the use of a special typographical symbol — it looks like an “S” that’s had one too many tequila shooters and is in need of a lie-down — to indicate when material was taken from another source, and then link to it.

One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it’s a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery — we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed. What makes this contagion of semi-serendipity possible is an intricate ecosystem of “link love” — a via-chain of attribution that allows us to discover new wonderlands through those we already know and trust.

The Curator’s Code is an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics — first, understanding why attribution matters, and then, implementing it across the Web in a codified common standard, doing for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution.

Ignoring for a moment that Popova used the words “magical,” “whimsical,” “wonderland,” and “semi-serendipity” to talk about the Internet, her basic premise is sound. Copying and linking is an essential part of the Web; we need a way for readers to easily grasp when a story is original and when it’s building on someone else’s story (or just a warmed-over rehash).

Granted, we do our own brand of curating here at Cringeville. Over the past few years, my Notes from the Field blog has morphed into Notes from the Blogosphere. In general, though, I try to gather material from multiple sources or combine two disparate stories — say, the alleged acquisition of Mashable and The Curator’s Code — then season it all with generous helpings of snark (incidentally, a delicious yet nutritious way to stretch your family’s news budget). But don’t expect to find the drunken S on InfoWorld.com any time soon.

Salmon’s report about the CNN-Mashable deal was extremely light on actual facts, and he got the story on the QT at SXSW, possibly after a few too many tequila shooters. At this point we don’t know whether it is all just a mescal-induced hallucination. It could be that the basic premise is true, but Salmon added an extra zero to the sum when he scribbled it on an El Torito cocktail napkin. That would make more sense to me. No matter: This is the way of the Web, circa 2012.

At least until the apocalypse hits.

Is Mashable worth $200 million? If not, what site is? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “CNN and Mashable? Welcome to Web journalism’s end days,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.