T-Squared: Take Our Content — Please!

We owe it all to ProPublica. Earlier this week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative news outlet touted a new bit of functionality of its site that makes it easier for any media organization, blog, etc. to scrape its content for the purpose of being republished. ProPublica operates on the premise that greater exposure to the work of its reporters is mission-critical, so it gives away what it produces on a daily basis to anyone who wants it. Well, that's pretty much our model: Anyone who wants to run a Trib story knows well by this point that we're happy to make it available for free. So when we saw the easy-as-pie "republish" capability on ProPublica's site, we thought, let's do the same thing. And we did.

Effective immediately, inspired by our big-brother-in-arms, we've added our own "republish" button on most of our pages. Click it and a window will pop up with (1) the basic rules you must follow to be one of our syndication partners in good standing, and (2) the story you'd like to purloin, presented in both HTML and plain text formats. Select the "copy to clipboard" option and ... voilà.

In the brave new world of magnanimous collaboration, this seems like a no-brainer. Next?