What News Websites Can Learn from Blogs – Proper Attribution

There’s a nice debate happening on the web about an NYT blogger who was let go because he lifted content from WSJ without attribution.
Felix Salmon writes:

The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren’t really bloggers at heart.. It’s almost as though they think that linking to a story elsewhere is an admission of defeat, rather than a prime reason why people visit blogs in the first place.

Mathew Ingram writes:

Some news sites have become notorious for either rewriting an entire post from a competitor, or excerpting huge portions of the content on their own sites, with just a small link that credits the original source. The economic incentive is the same, whether it’s a web-only outlet or a traditional media web site: to aggregate pageviews and sell them to advertisers.

Tom Foremski writes:

When I became a journalist/blogger more than five years ago, I loved the fact that I could quote directly from many news sources and then add my contribution to the story.. This embarrassment wouldn’t have been an embarrassment if its reporters were allowed to do the decent thing and attribute and link back.

Dan from PA writes:

Perhaps a solution might be to require newspaper authors to cite their sources. It's what we do in academia. Online, it would be rather simple to implement. It could be implemented as a hidden feature for those who wished to read only the text.

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