I know there are alot of you out there who like to pimp the fact that you read the news by posting articles in your blogs. This practice is acceptable within reason. We moderators have been discussing how to tackle the problem of copy/paste blogs without any substance. I've decided to post this as a guide that you should use should you want to put an article into your post. In general, e-mails and chain letters will have to have some really good justification and will not be looked favorably by the site moderators. Firstly, make sure you have a position. 'Blog' is a foreshortening of 'web log;' it's a journal, not a scrapbook. There's no point in posting an article if you don't have anything to say about it. If your aim is to provoke discussion alone, your post belongs in the forums, not on your blog. Generally, the majority of your post should consist of your opinions. Secondly, there's really no reason why you should post an entire article. Most news sources use AP style which recommends the "inverted pyramid" method. What this means is that journalists are taught to write in a style such that the important information is contained within the first few paragraphs of an article. This is done so editors can easily chop an article from the bottom when they have limited paper space instead of having to sift through a lengthy article to pick out the important parts and essentially rewrite the entire thing. Keep this in mind when you're copying an article. Generally all of the essential information will be contained in the first three or four paragraphs. If there's a statistic later on in the article that you think is relevent, there's no reason why you can't mention it in your commentary. Thirdly, cite your source and post a link when possible. This will accomplish three things: 1) you will not be plagiarizing, 2) you will have established legitimacy, 3) given that you're clipping the article, other users will be able to read the article in full and pick out points that you may have missed or ignored (we all do it, sometimes intentionally). The last thing of importance regards international and US copyright laws. Although the AP newswire is utilized by many newspapers (have you noticed how many different newspapers often have the same stories?), it is unlawful to reproduce an article in full without the author's consent (cited or not). This is why the second point is of such importance. The point of this site is to have a point. Copying and pasting an article into your blog is not a point. Moderators will begin considering posts for deletion that only copy and paste articles from news sites. The basic rule to keep in mind is, "Would I want to read this here?" Keep blogging and have fun! --Mike