I wrote a piece on attribution for Press Gazette that kicked off like this:

The Times on Monday carried a story that appears to rely heavily on the work of a blogging journalist. It’s about the TV ‘phone con.’ Other papers too followed the story up. Nowhere is the journalist mentioned, referred or linked to. And no money exchanged hands.

Here are the links: Times / Blog

You can do the comparison yourself.

In the blogs I read, articles link back to sources or refer readers around different views so they can better orient themselves.

In making that point, it’s been mentioned to me that it looks like I’m accusing the Times of plagiarising stuff online. I’m not. The piece was about tracking back or linking to stories, or information, that got there first.

I would like journalists to seek out and link back to material that relates to their story. And that includes me…

The Times reporter was actually following up a NOTW piece that added photos to the mix, and both pieces were in turn followed up by a number of other outlets.

I know it’s not easy. The tendency in offline journalism is to try and get your own sources for a story. But the online world means those sources may well themselves be feeding off material that’s already out there, or even recycling stuff they themselves have put into the public domain.

To take the ‘phone con’ in yet more detail – material relating to the Eamonn Holmes story (and he just happened to be a guest on the cookery show, remember) appears to pop up first in the blog mentioned above on Friday, 23 February 2007. It has a reaction from the BBC, and details of the food served. Even though reporters might not have taken their cue from that piece, searching would have established that it was out there, and made it linkable.

For example, had I searched under Eamonn Holmes and Saturday Kitchen (the show Holmes appeared on) instead of Eamonn Holmes and pears (one of the things he had to eat), I would have spotted not only the blog post, but also the fact that the story first appeared embryonically on a Digital Spy forum back on the very day of Saturday Kitchen‘s broadcast, Saturday, 2 December 2006. The first post is at 10:39. In other words, while Eamonn was still ‘live’ on 5 Live. This is it:

I’m being a bit dense here, (I’m not long up) but Saturday kitchen invites people to phone in with their questions, so I assumed it was live.
Radio 5Live also encourages people to phone/text so I thought that was live.
Eamonn holmes is on both programmes this morning – which one is live?

So no-one’s perfect. Not least (it will amaze no-one to learn) me. But my point remains – it ought to be our goal as journalists to seek out and flag up information that is out there, if only to demonstrate that:

a) we know it’s there, and
b) that we’re bringing a little extra to the party.

Even if it is, in my case just the ‘scoop’ of interpretation.