Posting online corrections
Back in November, I published a post titled “Blogging: Is it first draft journalism?” In it, I contemplated the various ways journalists could publish corrections online and highlighted what I thought to be the most intellectually honest way to do so.
A few weeks ago I published an article titled “Is journalist burnout on the rise?” and later that day Editor and Publisher, a trade publication for the newspaper industry, lifted facts from that article without attributing them to me.
After alerting E&P about the lack of attribution the editor quickly modified the article so I’m mentioned in it twice. All was well and good and I wrote an email to the editor thanking him for the change.
Today, journalist Amy Gahran wrote and published an article at Poynter.org about the incident titled “When a Correction Isn’t Enough.” She interviewed both the editor of E&P and me via email, and in it she makes an argument about how online corrections should be handled.
You might find my story interesting.
A few years ago I published an in-depth interview with a software developer about a music sharing program named Irate Radio. It was a thorough and ( I feel) a well-written article.
A few months later I noticed someone else had run a similar article, not only on this software but other pieces of software as well. IT was ultimately a fairly short article (mine was feature-length). The writer lifted a lot of stuff from my article and even key phrases (and jokes). He was writing for a major news service, and the article was reprinted about 200 times online (including I think CNN/Fortune European edition, or something like that).
I was flattered and happy that Irate radio was receiving the publicity. I wasn’t claiming a major violation of journalistic integrity, but I would have liked to get the link traffic or even partial credit. But if the reporter had linked to me, it would have been clear where he found his “money quotes” and besides lots of MSM just do not link externally. So he did not do it. The best I could do is track down that individual’s email and send him a polite note wishing that he could have acknowledged my article as a a source.
One pet peeve is bloggers or journalists who link to articles without mentioning the name of the person who wrote the article. NYT did not write an article; they paid for Frank Rich or Adam Nagourney to do so. People think that as long as they link to the article, it is not necessary to provide actual attribution. The problem with that is that it’s hard for the writers to verify who actually is reading the article. Also, it’s common for journalists to archive articles they wrote for a publication on their personal site. If you don’t know the writer’s name, you can’t check the writer’s personal site for other articles.
Robert,
That is an interesting story.
I don’t know if I agree though about having to always include the name of the author. Sometime that just makes things wordy and bogs down the piece. That’s what’s wonderful about the internet, you can attribute something with a simple link and it doesn’t have to interrupt the flow of your narrative.