Daily Mail takes fresh approach to the cut and paste brigade

Have you seen what happens when you cut and paste some copy from a Daily Mail story?

When you past the section you’ve copied (such as that passage highlighted right) it automatically pastes a link such as this as well into the document or email you are preparing:

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1207444/Public-school-teacher-facing-jail-having-lesbian-affair-pupil.html#ixzz0OcHJrJfr

And then, cleverer still, when you click on that link it takes you to the article you’ve cut and paste from, highlighting, in bright yellow for you the section you’ve copied. This appears to be aimed at providing context and ease of reading for those people sharing news snippets via email; positively encouraging the pracice in the process.

This isn’t the first time Media Bloggers have been impressed with the Daily Mail’s increasingly web-savvy approach.

See also:

The Express fiddles while the Daily Mail earns

Comments

[Jim Connolly]

Will,

Nice to see a newspaper embrace the potential for sharing their content, rather than just locking it down.

Thanks for sharing this.

[JamWheel]

Nice, shame it is such an awful newspaper.

[Scott Gould]

I retweeted this and it got a lot of interest. As Jim says, it is nice (albeit unusual) for a newspaper to take such an open view

[Will Sturgeon]

Thanks for the comments and the retweets.

[Jamie]

You really think inserting script that destroys formatting and adds unwanted text when users try to share content is 'web savvy'?

I think not. For the purposes of emailing snippets like you mention, sure. For tweeting, blogging, redditing, digging, whatevering, it's an awful idea. In fact, it actually lengthens the process of tweeting the article rather than shortening it - or, more likely, convinces the user not to bother.