After catching up on email over the past few days, I saw this interesting question about magazine articles from one of my favorite readers. I thought it was a good one, and one that I should clear up just in case you were thinking about doing this…
Q: Can I Post Magazine Articles To My Blog?
A: Remember when I told you in about a million other articles that the simple act of writing your content or typing your content protects you under U.S. copyright laws? These laws apply to everyone. So the same applies to articles you find in print mediums such as newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.
BUT what you can do, is this:
1. REFER to a portion of the magazine article that applies to what you are writing about and make sure to include appropriate attribution. For example, you can put the portion of the article in quotes or blockquotes and add an *asterisk symbol at the end of the quote which will refer to the author and publication of this magazine blurb.
Example: put your magazine chunk or blurb into blockquotes. *
*Lisa Angelettie – Article Marketing Strategies
You can also do this:
2. REWRITE a magazine article that you want to cover on your own blog. Make sure to include the magazine as a source for your article. This means that while you aren’t totally ripping them off, you are basing your article on information you gathered while reading an article in their publication. Again you’ll use the asterisk symbol at the end of the article with the source (*Source: Article Marketing Strategies)
This really applies to news related items. If you write a gossip blog and you read a article in US Weekly about Kim Kardashian and her new television show that you want to use on your blog – you can rewrite the news item and add US Weekly as a source for the article. (*Source: US Weekly)
It’s also a nice idea to link to the original article in your attribution footnote, but it’s not mandatory. It’s just nice to do for the publication.
The bottom line here is that you will not lose any credibility or cool points for properly attributing the source or the author of an article. In fact – you must do it or you will simply be a content thief and subject to copyright laws. So feel free to use magazine articles, refer to magazine articles, rewrite magazine articles – but make sure to give them their fair acknowledgment.
Lisa Angelettie
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