E-Commerce News: Big "BOO" from the Blogosphere

It's well known that many journalists get their story ideas from blogs nowadays and never give credit to the bloggers who tipped them off.  While most bloggers wish they could be acknowledged, they're happy enough to be impacting the news cycle.

But what about when a journalist quotes from a blog, then makes it look like he got those quotes from an interview?

John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center where I'm a fellow, recently wrote this insightful blog post about a lawsuit brought against Google by a pornographer. (Like all good bloggers, Palfrey duly credits to and links to his original sources.) Today, an article by Keith Regan in the E-commerce News quotes extensively from Palfrey's blog post.  Without those quotes, there wouldn't have been much of an article. But the way in which the article is written - with "Palfrey said," before or after each quote - makes it look as though the quotes came from an interview. Palfrey tells me (via email) that he never spoke to Regan.  I wonder if Regan's editors think he spoke to Palfrey?  Or did his editors take out the reference to the blog as too confusing? (Not inconceivable - in all fairness to the reporter.)

Last time I checked, the standard journalistic practice was that if a reporter quotes from somebody's book or article, he or she must make that clear - and not leave things so vague as to give the impression that the quotes came from an interview.  Seems to me that the same standard of honest reporting should be applied when quoting from blogs.

SUGGESTION TO NEWS ORGANIZATIONS: As you revise your "standards and practices" handbooks to fit this new online age, the most honest and credible thing to do would be to require that when a journalist quotes from a blog, he/she must make this clear. Furthermore, the blog's URL should be named or linked-to, so that the readers can judge the source blog's credibility for themselves, and there can be no dispute about whether the quote was accurate or in context. 

Comments

[Nick Lewis]

I've been rather annoyed at the unwillingness of many journalists to provide links to blogged sources. I wonder if the decision to not provide links is the journalists, or the editors? I suspect it to be the editors... ...but at the request of the corporate bean counters.

After all, providing links leads to less "sticky eye-balls" as David Weinberger calls them. And the less eye-balls sticking to a daily's website, the less ad-revenue. However, I fully agree that it should become standard practice to provide links. Screw the bean counters...

[poputonian]

This is interesting. A year ago after Bush gave a speech to the National Endowment For Democracy, I was so perturbed at his frequent use of words like freedom, liberty, and democracy that I counted the number of times he used them. I made this comment on CalPundit's blog (now Political Animal at Washington Monthly):

Lofty platitudes -- freedom 36 times, liberty 18 times, democracy 30 times. Our noble cause = the way to justify anything.

That was on November 9, 2003. One week later, this turn of phrase appears in an SF Gate column by Harley Sorensen, a column picked up and still appearing at Common Dreams:

Did I say "con job"? What else can you say about a speech that mentions "Reagan" seven times, "liberty" 18 times, "freedom" 36 times and "democracy" (singular or plural) a whopping 49 times? Is the speaker imparting information or blowing smoke?

Coincidence? Probably. But you have to wonder if Sorensen was reading Calpundit, and if so, why he wouldn't just say something like, "as I picked up in blogosphere ... "

I don't think doing so would detract from his article at all.

[Greg Gershman]

Here's a useful site for finding plagarism online: http://www.copyscape.com/

Enter in a URL, and it searches for similar content online. For Palfrey's article, it doesn't find the instance you mention, but it does find another site that seems to have "interviewed" Palfrey.