Young is the co-author (with David Phillips) of Online Public Relations and is one of the leading academics in the UK researching and teaching on social media. Over the last five years he’s established his faculty at Sunderland as a centre of excellence.

We’re always keen to take up any opportunity to talk to undergraduates that are learning about traditional media, online and social media, and might want to pursue a career at Speed in the future.

Phillips has brought a fresh perspective to the NLA debate by challenging the ownership of original content. It’s a debate that Phillips has supported with a real time case study.

“I went to this page in The Times, analysed it to get the semantic concepts. Looked for those concepts in Bing.com and found that loads of other people and publication wrote this story in similar terms long before The Times.”

“When The Times vanishes behind its firewall will this mean that it will pay all the other sites for the news it plagiarises from them as well as suing all the sites that use the same story after they publish offline or behind the firewall?”

“Who, then is going to set up the counter organisation to the NLA to get their money back from newspapers who borrow/plagiarise content from the online community?” asks Phillips.

Its Flat Earth News revisited. Phillips works from the premise that very little is original. And so we very quickly get into a debate about how original content is created and how you credit the originator and the organisations that circulate a story.