josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Unless this was an IM discussion, it’s questionable how the 43-word paragraph made it nearly verbatim into Dowd’s column, but enough crucifying of Maureen Dowd has occurred across the blogosphere, so I’m going to pass on that aspect of the discussion. What I see here is not just a case of plagiarism, but a perfectly illustrative situation of the general disrespect of mainstream media for the blogosphere.

Much has been said about the importance of mainstream media: they have the fact-checkers, resources, and the investigative teams and they are the only ones who can do the kind of unearthing that enables us to live as an informed society. Bloggers, on the other hand, are the exploiters, the ones who take the hard work of journalists everywhere and turn it into cheap (or, in most cases, free) photocopies. Shame on those bloggers, shame, shame, shame.

Except that’s not really the case. Increasingly, the exploitation is happening on the side of the mainstream media.

In February, a friend of mine, Brooks Bayne, wrote a blog post about the suspiciously massive increase in followers for select Twitter users. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter left him a comment explaining it was a possible effect of the Suggested Users feature that Twitter had recently implemented.

A couple of days later, The LA Times’ Mark Milian picked up the story and featured William’s comment. While Milian’s piece links the original blog post, no credit is given to Bayne. Milian simply credits the comment as having appeared on “another blog post.”

I contacted Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and a champion of the blogosphere’s role in journalism, about the issue. He responded via e-mail, saying: “It happens all the time. It sucks.”

Rosen told me there was no standard for citing the information or ideas that journalists fid in blogs or new media.

“There should be,” he said.

He linked me to Can I Get A Link Please?, a site devoted to getting bloggers linked back by the mainstream publications that use their content, information, and ideas.

The blog lists a study by Brodeur released last year which reveals that over three quarters of the journalists surveyed use blogs to get story ideas, insight and angles. A piece at Taking The Blogosphere Seriously summarized the results as follows:

Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week… About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.

The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

Can I Get A Link Please? also features a clip from a panel at the Carnegie Counsel’s Ethics Studio featuring Rosen, in which he illustrates the importance of the link, not only in terms of attribution, but in terms of using the web as it was made to be used—to connect information.

The link—which is the idea that “you’re interested in this, but did you know about that?” Or “here is what I’m saying, but you should you see what they’re saying.” Or “you’re here but you know there is also this over there,”—is actually building out the potential of the web to link people, which is what Timothy Berners-Lee put into it in the first place. So when we link, we are expressing the ethic of the web, which is connecting people and knowledge.

… When we talk about this stereotypical conflict between the bloggers and the mainstream media—by the way, Michael, the only people who worry about whether bloggers are going to replace the news media are people who work in the news media. Nobody else talks about that.

But when we think about it, think about the news industry’s reaction to the rise of the web. When the major news sites built their first pages, which was about 1996, they decided to re-purpose their content from the print platform and put it it online, which certainly makes sense. You paid all the costs already for all the articles and features that you produced for The Washington Post newspaper, now you have this new way to distribute them, put them onoine, you get new audience, new readers… In re-purposing their content on the web, which is a rational thing, they made up some rules from themselves. One of the rules was: you don’t send people away from your domain. That is, you don’t link out from the Washington Post to the rest of the web. Because you’re the Washinton Post! You have everything… why would we send you anywhere else?

So when they decided to give birth to their first websites, their sites were actually anti-web because they didn’t understand the ethic of the link. And they didn’t accept the ethic of the link. And it’s taken them a long time to learn the ethic of the link because the Washington Post is willing to share their knowledge with you but the whole idea of connecting people to knowledge wherever it is, which is the ethic of the web, has taken them a while to understand. And so the bloggers were the people who came along and who developed the web first as a tool for informing people, because they didn’t have these rules. And they used it for what it was for.

As more publications, as more journalists get on the web with their own blogs, I hope that the practice of the link and proper attribution of bloggers improves dramatically. After all, it is an abrogation of a journalist’s responsibility to not do their due diligence in citing and crediting their sources appropriately, whether they deign take the blogosphere seriously or not.

In closing I offer another paragraph from Jay Rosen’s talk at the Carnegie Ethics Studio:

As a blogger what I try to do is do everything well, all the time and give you way more than you asked for every single time you come to my blog. More knowledge than you thought, more links than you bargained for, more nuance, more depth, more education than you imagined when you clicked that link.

Absolutely.

Of possible interest:
The Myth of the Parasitical Blogger at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald echoes the sentiments I express in this piece, and notes a similar example of the mainstream media picking up story ideas from a blogger—in this case, his piece, which inspired an article in the Economist.

Maureen Dowd Gets a Pass, But in Journalism, Plagiarism Still Matters by BlogHer’s Kim Pearson offers the reaction to Dowd’s actions from the media as well as a list of past plagiarism scandals.

Id Maureen Dowd Guilty of Plagiarism? at TIME.com

Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM’s Josh Marshall at The Huffington Post