Journalism in Mahjong
MahjongNews really seems to be at the centre of controversy this month! Some more article comments seem to have triggered some interesting opinions.
ReachMahjong.com are obviously longtime friends of MahjongNews. We have an ad for MahjongNews at the bottom of the site and they link back to us. They even have a great news feed from our site on theirs right now. We seem to happily occupy slightly different roles as mahjong sites so we haven’t had to compete too much.
MahjongNews was at the centre of the recent controvesy about MahjongTime and whether it’s a reliable bearer of the internet mahjong flame. The article comment sections seems to have been witness to another argument. This time regarding the journalistic quality of the site.
The main issue in question seems to be the usage of articles from other mainstream internet newspapers (reuters articles etc.) that are then posted up to MahjongNews.com.
The arguments given so far are thus:
The reason to do it: It sums up interesting stories from the internet about my hobby that I can read all together in a nice digestible package. I don’t have to search for articles. Someone has done it for me. Yay!
The reason to not do it: There is no added commentary to the news article so it’s not contributing something new.
The thing to remember is that this sort of thing is done quite a lot on far bigger sites. Kotaku, for example, often post links to interesting articles from news pages, blogs etc and then simply summarize the story before the link. Their journalists are just people writing articles and reading the internet like us and then bringing it all together in an easy collection.
I suspect that is what MahjongNews is trying to achieve and in that case, they succeed. If they started posting too much commentary then RM.com and MahjongNews.com might find ourselves in competition!
