Colombo, Media and Communications

Online journalism is the way forward, but tell this to Sri Lankan media companies

GROSS PLAGIARISM BY NIBRAS BAWA, AUTHOR OF THIS POST

A sharp reader alerted Groundviews that this article contains plagiarised content. Upon further inspection, we discovered that entire portions of the article have been copied verbatim from other web sources. This is a clear violation of site guidelines, and we sincerely apologise to the original content owners and producers over the inadvertent publication of their material herein.

An explanation by Nibras Bawa, the author, in response to an email sent by Groundviews as to how this occurred is published here, with a few sources named.

However, we strongly reject the point that plagiarism is relative and think it is rather silly to take, verbatim, material from other sites and parade them as one’s own.

Further, in addition to the site noted by Magerata and subsequently by us, Nibras Bawa has clearly and incredibly plagiarised from other web sources. Noting these, we have edited the article accordingly.

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For example, what comes to one’s mind when one thinks of a Sri Lankan media company website? No offence meant to any media industry stakeholders, but these websites are rife with horrible layouts, graphics, sensationalism driven news, 404 error pages, broken links, browser incompatibility, and outdated technology. You have to see it to believe it (no pun intended).

Cases in point are online video on these media sites. The number of news web sites that put pre-roll ads in front of their online videos in shocking. A clever soul thinks that they have to poison every conceivable piece of content with advertising. You already have me at your site and you are jamming as much advertising as you can at me. Can I just watch the damn video please?

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But the innovation of Sri Lankan journalism on the Internet has lagged.

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The technology folks at these companies can’t even figure out how to leverage a good open source CMS to serve fairly static content at the fastest possible throughput. It is unreasonable therefore to expect them to develop technology to do anything transactional?

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Consumers use internet for entertainment and communication and they will go to alternatives like facebook, and I would argue that 2 years from now most Srilankans will get their news update from Twitter and not from any of the news sites.

But to me if Sri Lanka really wants to move forward, they need to stop hiring suits, and start hiring jeans. Take a gamble, waste some money.

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