Crediting Stories
A few years ago as blogging was the new boy on the block, some in the media desccribed blogs as parasites – that they just take stories off the traditional media, and never produce any news themselves.
In the last few weeks, I have been amused (and slightly annoyed) that we seem to have the reverse. Bloggers go to great lengths to credit stories, through links, hat tips and direct quotes. But the favours are not being returned.
A couple of weeks ago I ran the story on the Nationalist Alliance trying to build a whites only community in North Canterbury. Now I did nothing smart – it was given to me by a reader (the power in the blogosphere is in fact the readers who pass info on), but nevertheless there was nothing in the public domain on this until I write the story.
The next day it is a big story in the print media, and is almost the lead story on both TV channels that night. And not a single reference to where the story came from, except I think The Press referred to it being “leaked on the Internet”.
Should also mention Whale Oil broke the story on Winston’s non returned Ministerial car, and this finally became a major story – and again little or no reference to the source.
And yesterday I broke the story of the NZ Govt supporting Helen Clark for the UNDP job. Today one Sunday paper has it as a front page story, and ever proclaims it to be an exclusive. Hello? Now sure it is possible the paper wasworking on the story anyway, but to call it an exclusive when it was broken the previous day? And today the radio is referring to the story as being broken by the newspaper, when it was not.
I joked to someone today that as my stories are copyrighted to me, perhaps I could get certain media outlets disconnected from the Internet under the new copyright law đ
While I am having a whinge here, at the end of the day it isn’t greatly important to me. I’m not going to start stamping posts (like some do) with “Exclusive: Must credit”. I like being able to contribute, and do it because I enjoy it.