The Elusive News Credit
A view from an emulation news site fan

Disclaimer: This article is NOT ABOUT people giving or not giving EmuFanatics credit for news. I personally don't mind if people get the news from us and only usually care if credit is given for exclusive news belonging to EmuFanatics. Other wise I take a positive view of the situation and feel that if other news sites are coming to EmuFanatics for news then we must be doing something right. If you are an affiliate of EmuFanatics or if we are your main source for emulation news for your news sites then giving a credit every once in awhile would be great and way to show appreciation for our work here at EmuFanatics. Not every news item you take from EmuFanatics needs to credited, but like I said once in awhile would be nice.

I guess I should start this article off by explaining a bit about why I am writing this. I am personally a fan of emulation news sites and observing them and following their histories is sort of a hobby of mine. I usually give most news sites a visit on my daily travels around the emulation scene and I am seeing a growing trend with news credits.

Searching for and catching a site giving credit for news is a rare thing these days. Emulation news crediting used to be a hot topic around the scene years ago but seems to have faded over the years. This might be the result of better software for checking site content or maybe it's not as big of a deal as it used to be. After years of observing news sites I know some sites are great about giving credit and some don't bother. I of course don't know site policy for every site so maybe it's site policy not to acknowledge other news sites or maybe some news posters don't care about crediting. I also know some news posters like myself use software to check sites for news and rarely have a need to credit other news sites since we get the news straight from the source.

For me personally I check all the project sites then head over to news sites to see if there is anything I might have missed or never heard of. In these cases I always credit my sources because I feel sites should be credited for their work and expect other people that post for EF to do the same. I believe another trend that goes along with news crediting is the separation of sites and overall community. Everyone wants their site to be the best and wants their visitors to keep coming back. So if they were to keep giving credit to another site maybe they feel as though they will lose visitors to those sites. I see more competition between sites then I see cooperation. EmuFanatics is part of a network of sites that include Emulation 64, EmuHelp and DCEmu.co.uk and we work well together helping each other out whenever possible. I have benefited from this more then I would have if I competed against them. I do agree the best way to promote your site is to get it posted as much as possible and when credits are no longer given it tends to hurt your chances to grow. This especially effects newer sites such as exemu.net, vtemulation.net and emunext.net which are 4 of the newest sites that tend to get the back burner and will most likely rarely get credited for news and even less so if credits are no longer being given.

I would like to see some of the newer sites get some exposure and maybe give them some motivation to keep going. So many new sites tend to die off from the lack of exposure and interest. I see so many of the older sites still getting a lot of exposure even though they are either dead, stale, or just rarely updated. Maybe the emulation scene is too established and already stretched too thin. I know it can be hard to be unique and everyone posts the same news and has some of the same basic content. People have their favorites and some prefer the comfort of their regular communities rather then coming to a new site and community and having to establish themselves all over again.

I personally want to believe that the reason for the decline in news credits is because people are getting better at finding news or from better software for checking news. I would hate to think news posters don't credit because they don't want to for whatever reason. I think promoting the emulation news sites is a nice way to give back to the scene and helping each other out. News crediting is one way of doing this. Of course I am not saying every news article should be credited to someone, but if a news poster has that rare time where they get news from another news site, a common courtesy of a link back is always a nice touch.

Software I Use: I am currently using Website-Watcher and have over 230+ project sites that it checks. This is a great piece of software and a must have for any serious news poster. :)

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