In the Future, All Publications Will Be Inside All Other Publications

What’s possibly in these “full syndication” deals for publications taking their material to other publications? We find most of them don’t do us much good, with a few exceptions. (One good exception being partial syndication with some Huffington Post sections, particularly Business.) More and more, publications are throwing up their hands and just going with it. Syndication, once a brave act of sucking it all in for free, is now just the machines at work, folding the layer cake that is the Internet into itself over and over again. For example?

This is how a Slate story appears on Huffington Post.

I was like, where am I. Also, I was like, HOW DO I GET TO THIS STORY ON SLATE? I could not.

This is how that Slate story appears on Slate.

So far, Slate-Slate is performing better on Twitter, while Slate-Huffington Post is performing best on Facebook.

What’s even more jarring is that Slate looks better on the Huffington Post than it does on Slate.