Good lord. I hadn't read this til now. It explains a lot!
Why do you slough of the difference between attributed quotes and unattributed quotes as if it were nothing? It's the whole thing! It's the definition of plagiarism. If you didn't know that as of February of 2015, well, like I said: it explains a lot.
The point is that he presented other people's words as his own. Like I said: that's plagiarism. Do you think readers (remember them?) that readers believed that because there was a link in a passage, that passage was pasted in verbatim, and wasn't written by the person whose name is at the top of the story? Of course they didn't -- they assumed he wrote it.
This isn't some meaningless technical difference. The point is to be clear with readers (remember them?) about everything. What if someone quoted from the story and attributed that passage to Keller? That would be inaccurate. It would be incorrect. It's wrong information. It's the main thing we're supposed to avoid.
The problem with aggregation isn't an ethical one, really. Journalists have "aggregated" from the beginning. Time magazine was *nothing but* aggregation over its first several years (mostly in the form of paraphrases of stories from lots of different sources.) Nobody was harmed, and few people, if any, complained. Newspapers and magazines have always rewritten news stories produced by others, including competitors. When they couldn't verify stuff, they quoted from the original story. Not ideal, and you try to avoid it (for reasons of professional pride, mainly), but not unethical.
The problem with aggregation now is an economic one. Since we're all each getting our news from the same machine, it means that the "aggregation" often actually steals readers away from the publishers of the original stories. The ethical problem with this is new, born of the new economics of online publishing. It has nothing to do with plagiarism, which involves *deception*.
This isn't a difficult concept. You don't pass other people's work off as your own. The fact that he linked (and didn't even do that much with three of the stories, so really this is a bullshit apologia for the guy right from the start) didn't negate the plagiarism. Passages that aren't set off as quotes are assumed to be written by the bylined writer, link or no.
I know you're in prison right now (and I hope you're doing ok), so obviously if you respond it won't be for a while. But I was just so astonished to read this, even though it is, especially among the younger set, a bizarrely common bit of ... confusion, I guess. I mean, did it occur to you to *inquire* why people might think setting off and directly attributing quotes might be an important distinction? You just decided it wasn't and went from there.
Yeesh.
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