Lost in translation (by web bots?)

I’m new to WordPress blogging and have been surprised (sorry, naive) by the level of spam in commenting. I’ve approved 15 comments or pingbacks to my last post but have three or four times as many spam responses. Fortunately, I’m moderating comments.

But one in particular was amusing — a “translation,” if you can call it that, of some of that post as quoted by KDMC’s Michele McLellan in her recent Leadership 3.0 blog entry responding to posts by me and former Greensboro News & Record editor John Robinson. A couple of bot-aggregation sites ripped down the post.

They did, however, alter the wording. Boy howdy, did they ever. And I quote (emphasis is all theirs):

Thoughtful posts by Melanie Sill and John Robinson could infer highly exegetic for editors who are still heading normal newsrooms by a digital transition.

Sill, former editor of The Sacramento Bee, intent a contention with “Take it from former editors: Newspapers need bolder change.”

“The biggest threats to newspapers aren’t only their informed income problems and ever-proliferating competitors, though also a event costs of unwell to innovate some-more boldly—to be transformative, not incremental, in relocating forward,” Sill writes.

She continues:

I’ve oral with 8 or 10 former tip editors in a march of a final few months, some late and others operative in new jobs in media. From any we listened a chronicle of a same regrets: looking back, they wished they’d pushed harder, focused some-more on a universe outward newsrooms and responded some-more resolutely to a opportunities and hurdles of digital shift.

Thing is, there’s still copiousness of time. We’re not during a finish of change, we’re in a midst of it. Even for imitation newspapers, there’s copiousness of upside (and copiousness of audience)—not for a shrunken chronicle of a journal format of 1992 to be profitable in 2012, though for contemporary approaches to imitation to offer readers good as partial of a menu of options in a digital era.

Robinson, former editor of a News Record in Greensboro, N.C., picks adult a thread in “Newspapers: Looking behind to pierce forward”