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

The story exploded nationally when it was reported that the man responsible for the accident was an illegal immigrant who’d not only never had a license, but had a lengthy rap sheet, including 20 previous arrests.

Following the funeral of the boy, the attention shifted to the media. Berny Morson, a journo for The Rocky Mountain News, used the micro-blogging platform Twitter to take notes at the young boy’s funeral using his cell phone.

Live-tweeting—that is, reporting live using Twitter—is very common. From the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to the season premier of the CW show Gossip Girl, everyone’s doing it.

John Dickerson, who covers the presidential campaign for Slate, told The Washington Post, “If I have a thought that occurs to me, I’ll fire it off. Sometimes it ends up being the lead of a piece, or the notion a piece gets framed around.”

It’s probably not the first time someone has live-tweeted a funeral (heaven knows everything from being fired to giving birth has been live-tweeted since Twitter went live in 2006), but to my knowledge, this is the first time that a newspaper has run the unedited stream of live-tweets from a funeral as a sidebar on a major story.

Cara Degette at The Colorado Independent called it, “utterly, and unforgivingly, inconceivable.”

I asked Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who’s very active on Twitter, what he thought.

“My opinion is that you need to separate the method—Twittering from a funeral—from the execution; were these the right Tweets?” Rosen responded via an e-mail. “I don’t see anything wrong with the method. The content can be criticized.”

When asked how he would criticize the tweets, the former department chair said he didn’t know the community served by The Rocky Mountain News well enough to offer useful comments.

“Can someone explain the news value of this tweet stream for Rocky Mountain News readers?” Michelle Ferrier asked on the Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits blog. “I think the glitz of technology has taken over common sense.”

“I think there is a mania to use new technology no matter what and they aren’t thinking,” said John Windrow, night city editor at The Honolulu Advertiser. “It gives newsmen a bad name.”

Samuel Freedman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of Letters to a Young Journalist, offered some more insight.

“I think that reporters are often in the uncomfortable position of reporting from settings where people are in great grief,” Freedman told ABCNews.com. “These situations call for the greatest understanding and discretion on the part of the reporter. To be putting real-time notes out there as opposed to waiting until the ceremony is over; there’s an element of pillaging a private moment of grief that I’m uncomfortable with. A memorial service for a murdered—for a slain child—is not a fit subject for play-by-play updates.”

David J. Zucker, the rabbi who officiated at the service, told ABC News that he didn’t think there was anything offensive in Morson’s live-tweeting.

“The way I see it is that it’s somebody sharing to a wider community interested and felt connected to this sad event.”

In the midst of the hullabaloo, John Temple, editor at The Rocky Mountain News went on the record to clarify matters:

As is our custom, we asked the parents of Marten Kudlis whether we could cover his funeral. To be clear: We never enter funeral services to report on them without the family’s permission. Period.

… Most of us couldn’t attend the service. But that doesn’t mean we don’t empathize with the family and don’t want to join in their mourning in some way. Marten was one family’s son before he died. But because of the way he died, his loss was felt by thousands.

One way for a news organization to help a community connect is to send information live from the service, just as we do from events ranging from political conventions to road closings to concerts and parties. We don’t have to wait to publish in the next day’s paper anymore. TV and radio don’t wait, and people seem to value that.

I can imagine some might think live updates during a solemn event might be disruptive. But typically reporters can sit at the very back of a hall, out of the way of mourners.

Ultimately, to me, it’s all about execution. Poorly done, such journalism might very well feel inappropriate. Done well, I don’t think so.

Some criticism of the short blasts our reporter sent may be justified. They can seem cold, even crass. But I am responsible for that failing. It is my job to make sure our staff is trained properly.

Think of such live reporting as someone whispering into a phone directly to a global audience. There is no room for editors. What the reporter writes is what you read almost instantly. That requires special skill. It takes practice.

But to claim there is something inherently wrong with the idea is to make too sweeping a judgment. Everything from services for major public figures like presidents and popes to ceremonies for victims of tragedies like the one at Columbine High School have long been covered by TV and radio.

… We must learn to use the new tools at our disposal. Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something. It means we need to learn to do it well. That is our mission.

Shortly after composing this piece, I shot Twitter co-founder Evan Williams a DM asking his take. He replied with the following comment:

The concept does seem odd–coming to you “live” from… a funeral. And coming to you live via Twitter probably seems uncomfortable for at least a couple more reasons:

1) As opposed to newspapers, Twitter is in general not perceived as being very serious. Therefore, perhaps reporting a funeral via Twitter make it seem like it’s not being taken seriously.

2) While a reporter covering the funeral is probably taking notes anyway, sending text messages sounds disrespectful and like he/she is not really paying attention. (In reality he/she is probably paying more attention, in order to report.)

I didn’t read the tweets from the event, so I don’t know if any were inappropriate. But as far as whether the idea itself is flawed, I’d have to agree with John Temple: If the family was okay having the event reported on in general, it being covered while it was still happening shouldn’t be that much different. In these types of matters, though, people’s initial reaction may be more important than the logical argument. I do not blame the reporter (or newspaper) for not predicting people would react that way.

My prediction would be that in the future this type of thing does not seem odd, though. Live video coverage will probably also be common (not that we haven’t seen live video of funerals already).

What do you think—did The Rocky Mountain News go too far?

What’s Twitter? Read my piece about the microblogging platform here.