It's only illegal if you don't cite the source and are passing it off as your own content.

It's not fair use.  If you write an article, it belongs to you (or the publisher).  It cannot legally be published elsewhere without permission.

Righthaven initially entered agreements concerning old news articles from Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, based on a business model of suing bloggers, other Internet authors, and Internet site operators for statutory damages for having reproduced the articles on their sites without permission.^[9] An affiliate of Stephens Media owns half of Righthaven.^[10] As of 24 March 2011, 255 cases have been filed.^[11][12] Typically, Righthaven has demanded $75,000 and surrender of the domain name from each alleged infringer, but accepted out of court settlements of several thousand dollars per defendant.^[13] As of December 2010 approximately 70 cases had settled.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righthaven

Righthaven died, which made everyone happy, but that was because of a different issue.  It was ruled that only the publishers themselves had the right to sue.

"Check out this article on Kotaku: www.kotaku.com/a/link/to/a?stupid=article

I found it really awful, especially the part where they talk about that thing"

You don't need to paraphrase, you don't need to copy the whole article, no rules are broken, content creators/websites get their deserved hits.  Why is this so hard?  Why do people feel like they need to post ANY part of the article?  Thats not how this works, thats not how any of this works.

(This was directed at people disagreeing with OP btw)

The best thing to do is writing a completely twisted and warped summary and then providing the link to the original article, so people not clicking and reading it will have a totally wrong idea of what the article told.

not quite. It depends on the source. You can actually get sued for copyright infringment for copying the whole article. generally you are only safe in copying the link and a couple of paragraphs/summary. reproducing the entire article even if you source it can lead you into some nasty legal problems should the authors decide to be painful about it.

We aren't reporters. It's not our prererogative to have good reporting practices.

If you choose to report news in some capacity, you are taking on the role of an amateur reporter and should make an effort to follow basic ethical guidelines.

As for the topic, I read through the thread, and as nice as it is that this exact practice is against the rules, it is also the common form of forum news reporting that shows that it isn't a carefully enforced rule. I'd also like to mention how funny it is that people are trying to defend a practice that has been against the rules for awhile. Good job, those who defended this problem. You are an inspiration to everybody *cough*.

As for my solution, I find it odd how it's being cited as difficult. Maybe it's because I actually am a news reporter, but typing up three or four sentences paraphrasing the main idea of an article in an objective fashion is absolute child's play. I can literally do that in a few minutes, whereas I may spend 15 minutes to half an hour prepping a full 300 to 500 word news piece for a site.

I also find it hilarious how people that may post 20 to 30 times a day, and will debate in threads for pages on end, say it takes too much time or effort to type four or five sentences summarizing a news piece. Good god guys. Seriously. There are only so many excuses you can use here, and so far all of them absolutely suck.

I agree, this is a problem. I don't care if it's lazy, but I care that it's unethical. In my opinion, it's vastly better to just post a link to the original article and nothing else. It's not good but at least it's not unethical.

And if there really exists a rule against this already, it should be enforced. I literally see it all the time on this site.

Just passing to remember there is a forum rule regarding this and you should talk to mods about it since it's mods affair.

No, you're not. You're taking the roll of a discussion currator. No body is posting to report news, they are posting to discuss it. This isn't a news site - its a forum.