Readers know you’re not the only source of news. Quite often readers know which news org had a story first, and who’s wandering behind trying to get a fresh quote.

If you won’t take your readers seriously as informed consumers, why should they credit you with the gravitas which you feel you so richly deserve?

Instead of wasting time re-reporting what’s already known, acknowledge the report by another news org and TRY TO ADVANCE THE STORY!

The resources in this business that go into reproducing work that someone’s already done are a complete waste.

Follow the Reaganesque dictum of “trust but verify” and work on doing some original reporting. Your readers will thank you for it.

Posting about a piece of information that’s in the public domain, as Miss Heather did, doesn’t give her dominion over the news from then on. Goldberg picked up the tip and did his own reporting. He was indeed “gracious” to give her a h/t, because there was and is no obligation to do so.

She doesn’t own the information just because she saw it first. And she’s not being plagiarised unless somebody stole her words.

the great majority of the fossil media merely repeat ‘stories’ from the stringers of the prime aggregators ‘news services’ and republish pr handouts from universities, corporations and political parties without acknowledgement..

there is very little origination in the fossil media, the articles are mainly filler between adverts along with aforesaid puffery from establishment sources…

regards

Whether it should be standard practice is another problem altogether. I personally think papers should have a general policy to hat tip and trackback to their sources, both of ideas and information, because this is a conversation, after all.

Here’s a challenge for you: Look at the total number of bloggers out there and then find a total of 1% who blog like they were actual journalists. People who research stories, track down leads and verify facts. People who have done this for more than the 1 or 2 broken stories in their blogging carrier that have made them popular and then coasted on hawking opinions and regurgitation. I dare you! If you can’t do it, then my generalization is quite clearly valid.

Finally I never said that bloggers weren’t original. Mundane, unfortunately, is still original and the vast majority of content in the blogging world is just that original boring crap!

To characterize bloggers (in general) as “peddlers of opinion, regurgitators of news ” is just wrong. Some, perhaps many or even most, do that, but it’s not true that blogging=unoriginal or blogging=opinion.

We (bloggers) are peddlers of opinion, regurgitators of news published by others. We aggregate content and put our own spin on it, if we are even motivated to do that. With a very small percentile of exception, bloggers engage in a parasitic cycle of regurgitating the news from other sites adding our own spin or opinion. We produce our own mundane opinion pieces or life stories but very rarely, if ever, will the average blogger produce a piece that could be considered real “news”.

This does not a journalist make.

Who the hell do we think we are?”

Umm, hello? This is how newspapers work… it’s been the industry standard for long before there were blogs. Who wants to credit your competitors? Besides, by re-interviewing sources you give them a chance to correct errors, clarify things, etc.

The Post would credit Slate or Salon or any other online-only publication large enough to afford legal protection. Would they not credit a smaller website, one that wasn’t a blog-by-definition, on the grounds that it was just an online outfit and thus a blog?

I guess the “independently verified” is what confuses me. How aggressive would the Post be about verifying the story without acknowledging the source? Would they, for instance, re-interview people for quotes in a story to circumvent crediting a blog? To me, that’s not much better than just stealing the material and not crediting the source.

If you independently verify the facts in a story, there is no obligation to note who “had it first.” (Of course some newspapers do this as a matter of courtesy, but it is not an ethical or journalistic duty).

Television takes story ideas from newspapers all the time. Very rarely do you see them give credit. And why should they? They only have a very short length of time to tell a story — why should they waste time mentioning information that is only going to be of interest to about five people?

Kat, plagiarism is stealing someone else’s words. But ideas can’t be owned by anyone.