Bloggers routinely credit their sources of information because that’s the nature of blogging; you link to your source.
Print and television journalists have a different mentality. It’s all about the scoop. A National Journal piece describes this phenomenon well:
First, people who get into the news business are generally those who like to know things before others — and to get credit for it. The true journalist loves nothing better than walking into a room with some hot tidbit and watching the jaws drop. The need is almost physiological, the sensation downright glandular…
Second, news is, by definition, something new. A story somebody else has reported has already lost much of its inherent news value. On the most basic level, there is nothing newsier than a fresh scoop.
A reporter for The New York Times hates to admit — particularly in print — that a story was first reported in The Washington Post.
This is true at all levels of journalism — even the silly world of celebrity rags. When US Weekly reported that Nick and Jessica were breaking up, competing weeklies had to come back with a different angle — that “rumors that Nick and Jessica are breaking up aren’t true.”
In journalism, if you aren’t advancing the story, you’re not worth your paycheck. At least that’s the mentality instilled in many newsrooms.
Hence…therefore…thus…
When journalists get story ideas from blogs, there’s at least some incentive to not properly credit the source.
Here are three examples (or to be fair, suspected examples):
1. The Dallas Morning News on Friday reported that a staff writer covering the Dallas Mavericks had “researched the last two seasons and compiled the records of referees who have called Mavericks games.”
The story was fine, and I know that the paper did original research. I just wish the reporter had credited what I can only assume was his source of inspiration: Mark Cuban’s blog.
Cuban started running a very similar analysis of refs some time back. I know that I read NBA coverage all the time, and Cuban’s blog has been the only place I’ve found ref-by-ref win-loss records. It wouldn’t hurt the writer to say that’s where the idea came from. (If I’m wrong about this, I apologize to the reporter. But it’s at least an unlikely coincidence.)
2. Hans Kullin of Media Culpa says Swedish journalists borrowed from his blog – ironically, in a story about plagiarism. As he puts it: “At least I (and most bloggers) link to the original.”
3. In my own case, I recently e-mailed a Media Orchard item to a print publication with the thought that the pub would want to put the link on its blog. Instead, the pub wrote its own post, taking the content from my post and not bothering to link back to my site.
It was no biggie, though, because other blogs linked to my site and the post ended up receiving more than 10,000 referrals as a result.
The bottom line is, with 20 million blogs out there, print and TV journalists will find it increasingly difficult to cling to the “scoop” mentality — particularly when it comes to story concepts rather than information gathering. Better to acknowledge your sources than to leave it to your readers to discover them on their own.
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The Dallas Observer always has this same kind of problem with the Mroning News. They are always writing about stories that they uncovered and that the Morning News writes about afterward without mentioning that they got the story from the observer. interesting.
Yes, it’s common for a national newspaper to ignore an alt weekly. But back in the days of two Dallas dailies, when I worked for the Times Herald, we also wouldn’t acknowledge a scoop by the Morning News. We’d just say “according to published reports.”
Can you imagine that tactic working in the blogosphere?