Giving credit where credit is due

There was an interesting article on MediaShift a couple of weeks ago about what newspapers want when bloggers are linking to them. The writer decided to ask the opinions of three web editors, one of them being Jane Elizabeth of The Virginian-Pilot, our local newspaper, pictured left. The consensus among the editors: give credit where credit is due.

While there are arguments over how much content can be included in a post (some guidelines here) and still be considered “fair use,” for the most part, I’ve not seen wholesale copying and pasting of articles from newspapers, at least not from bloggers. I have seen what Elizabeth referred to:

If, for example, the Virginian-Pilot writes about an organization or business, the subject of the story will often copy and paste the entire piece to their website, sometimes even without a link.

That happens quite often. And the paper’s response – to notify the site – is appropriate.

But there are two problems with this “giving credit” thing.

First, online newspaper content, like that of PilotOnline, makes it difficult to give credit by constantly changing its permalink structure. Go back through my old posts and you will find one dead link after another. Recently, I was contacted by a campaign manager who was looking for the original source on a post of mine from 2007. The link was, of course, dead, and a PilotOnline search was fruitless. It took me a while but I finally found the story in the newspaper archives.

(Speaking of which – the Pilot changed its provider of the online copy of the newspaper – ePilot – which brought with it another whole set of broken links. And the entire archive for 1982-2000 is no longer accessible.)

Pick a permalink structure and stick with it. And it would be nice if there was a published policy on old content, i.e., it is purged after X months.

The second problem is much bigger, at least in the minds of most bloggers. Until recently, newspapers routinely lifted content from blogs without attribution. Even now, the attribution is lacking in that it references only the blog, not the specific post. Imagine, if you will, that every time I linked to a story on PilotOnline, I linked to the main page, rather than the specific story, leaving the reader to hunt around the site for it. That’s the equivalent of what I’ve seen most newspapers do, including the Pilot.

Giving credit where credit is due is a no-brainer: it’s simply the right thing to do. But it can’t be a one-way street. At the end of the day, newspapers and blogs are pretty much after the same thing: increasing readership. Meredith Artley, from the Los Angeles Times said it best:

“The more we reach out, the more we tell people about our coverage, the more we get our stories covered on other sites, and [by] new technologies, the more we spread the word.”

Yes. And that’s a win-win for everybody.