Credit Where It's Due: Online

Rafat Ali was upset. On September 20, 2005, he'd broken the story on his website, PaidContent.org, that Viacom was close to swooping up the online film and digital content company iFilm for around $50 million. PaidContent scooped the mainstream press and even the trades like Variety by hours—an eternity in the online news business.

But the next day, a brief, unbylined story appeared on The Wall Street Journal Online with news of the potential deal, attributing its information to "people familiar with the situation." The fact that the news had appeared on PaidContent hours before wasn't mentioned. Ali hit the roof.

Unlike The Wall Street Journal, PaidContent has been a one-person operation for most of its nearly four years of existence. Ali started in the site in late 2002 after stints at Inside.com and Jason Calacanis' pre-blogging ventures. Ali began covering digital content on his own, eventually building a small business that today has some support staff and a co-editor.

He'd also become sufficiently sourced up to break scoops like Viacom & iFilm, or the news back in August that Amazon intended to launch a digital music store, which, come to think of it, The Wall Street Journal also borrowed from PaidContent without attribution. After some indignant emails, the editors fixed the story. But now, a month later, WSJ had done it again.

Tired and angry, Ali posted a note on his site at two in the morning calling out Paul Steiger—the Journal's managing editor—and his top online deputies for the theft of his story. "Shame on you, Paul Steiger, Gordon Crovitz, and Bill Grueskin (and whoever edits the media section, and writes these stories)," he wrote, "…teach yourself and your journalists some ethics on crediting. Your reporter was not up till 2 AM in the night confirming and writing this...I was."

Someone was listening. The Journal's corrected its story later that day on its site with a note high in the story that read: "News of the talks was reported earlier by the Web site paidcontent.org," plus a link to the site.

"It was the completely wrong way to do it," Ali admits today," but I don't think The Wall Street Journal will ever do that again. It's one of those things where you have to make a fool of yourself so they'll learn."

Ali's strategy worked. He soon heard word of meetings and memos at the paper sparked by his rant ("it snowballed," Ali says), and a little more than a week later, Steiger himself told a panel of his peers that "I had to send a note to my colleagues the other day to remind them that blogs in specific industries have become every bit as important as trade publications … and if you fail to credit one of them it's just as bad as failing to credit another print publication." Jeff Jarvis, who was on the panel with Steiger and blogged these words, noted in his report that "at this moment, the bloggers looked at each other and mouthed the word 'Rafat.'" And two months later, the paper included PaidContent.org in its round-up of the best industry blogs publishing today. (The Wall Street Journal did not respond to emails seeking comment for this story.)

CHANGE COMES SLOWLY TO THOSE WHO GRIPE
Macedonia-based journalist Chris Deliso had a similar experience when the United Press International (UPI) failed to credit his site, Balkanalysis.com, for a story it borrowed liberally from back in February 2005. Deliso, a former UPI reporter, haggled with the news service for months for a correction and admission that it had plagiarized him, but had to settle for a partial mea culpa and a change in a nearly century-old policy. "For the first time in UPI's 97-year existence, 'intelligence briefs will have to be sourced,'" he emailed me. "What a revolutionary concept!"

Ali's spat with The Wall Street Journal last fall and Deliso's battle with the UPI were just a pair of skirmishes in the latest manifestation of the media industry's generational struggles for legitimacy. Every upstart publisher at least since the invention of the printing press has had to battle for the professional respect of its peers, who until then feel they're well within their rights to strip-mine these supposedly lesser publications for insights and scoops when assembling their own stories. Each medium has developed its own distinct hierarchy of acceptable bigfooting, whether it's the network news staffs piggybacking off local affiliates, or publishing blue-chips like the Journal content to watch narratives play out in the trades until the timing is right to swoop in with the definitive Page One story.

But A. J. Liebling's old chestnut about a free press being limited to those who own one was rendered moot by the advent of online publishing a decade ago, and the evolution of light-weight, idiot-proof publishing tools (i.e. blogging software) has served to further disaggregate publishing from hierarchical institutions of publishers and editors down to one-man outfits like Rafat Ali or his brothers-in-arms like Om Malik (Gigaom.com) and Glenn Fleishman (Wi-Fi Networking News).

These three examples sidestep the "is blogging journalism?" debate by being journalists who happen to have blogs, and who happen to break news and spark trends on them. Fleishman, for example, is a veteran of the tech press and an occasional contributor to The New York Times who describes himself as "a freelance technology journalist who is the editor of Wi-Fi Networking News."

It was on that site that Fleishman posted an item back in May about Victrola Coffee & Art, a Seattle café that turns its free Wi-Fi off on the weekends to encourage patrons to talk to each other rather than hunch over their laptops for hours after purchasing a single coffee. Fleishman was almost immediately asked by The New York Times to write a longer story about the politics of free Wi-Fi usage, with Victrola as the lede. His original, Wi-Fi Networking News story made into a Bulgarian newspaper, albeit without his permission ("it was all in cyrillic, except for my name," he says) and the Financial Times splashed its own Victrola piece on the front page less than a week after Fleishman's item appeared. "They did their own research and did not give me any credit at all. The reporter said 'I feel for you,' but the paper has this conceit where they don't give credit to anybody. As long as I'm being treated the same way as The New York Times, I don't mind that much."

Fleishman's understanding of the FT's policy isn't quite right, according to its U.S. news editor, James Montgomery. "We might credit someone, and there are guidelines for doing so, but it has to be a genuine and notable scoop," he says. "It's not axiomatically the case because you read it somewhere else first, or because they brought it to your attention." Montgomery also exhibits the conflicted feelings of acceptance and skepticism that many in the mainstream media feel toward unaffiliated journalists: "In principle, there's no reason why we wouldn't attribute a story to a blog or a website. Blogs are becoming part of the landscape the way TV and newspapers are, and they will be treated in the same way. That said, we are a little more skeptical about some blogs, because it's not clear what their sourcing is. They say something without explaining where their information came from. Some tend to mix their opinions and facts a bit promiscuously."

A GENERATIONAL SHIFT
Issues of trustworthiness aside, Montgomery's explanations raise questions about where, in the instantaneous publishing age, the line for giving credit should be drawn. Fleishman argues that tipping one's hat toward the source "where you got a lead on the story you further developed is just courtesy and a demonstration of respect. The fact that I know more than the reporter does, and the reporter wants to get a take on the subject from my reporting deserves a nod. I think that just boils down to professionalism." But if adopted, it would also set a landmark precedent for reporting in the digital age. As sources and inspirations for stories increasingly acquire their own power to publish, it becomes easier for a mainstream media outlet's audience to track the origins of stories back to those sources. So should the reporter give them a shout-out up front?

If so, then the editors of Sports Illustrated, the web hands at ESPN, and sports reporters everywhere had better start name-checking Will Leitch more often. As the editor of Deadspin.com, Gawker Media's sports blog, Leitch and his site have proven to be a prime source of material for reporters on the college and professional football beats this season. He's posted photos of Chicago Bears quarterback Kyle Orton with Jack Daniels dribbling down his chin, and of a costumed Washington Redskins running back Clinton Portis giving press conferences as full-fledged alter egos like "Sheriff Gonna Getcha" and "Coach Janky Spanky." Portis' antics, which were buried in obscurity on the Redskins' website a few months ago, received airtime on Fox's broadcast of the Redskins' playoff game this weekend, in no small part because Leitch called attention to it. In this case, Deadspin didn't break the story, but it did amplify it within the media consciousness. So does Leitch deserve credit for that? He's accepted the mainstream press' bigfooting, though: "They can do it because they're ESPN, SI and Fox."

So how much longer will it be before PaidContent.org, Wi-Fi Networking News, and Deadspin are afforded a measure of the respect they deserve? All three editors—Ali, Fleishman and Leitch—are optimistic that the increasing sophistication of blog-searching sites like Technorati, and Yahoo! will eliminate the "Oh, I didn't see your story" excuse the same way Nexis and Factiva have done the same for mainstream publishing outlets. Fleishman also believes that the rise of Google and other news aggregators like Topix.net—both of which decreasingly distinguish between media companies and blogs when cold-bloodedly calculating the relevance of stories—flatten the landscape for niche journalists like himself. "Wi-Fi Networking news shows up next to The New York Times in Google News Alert," he says. Those new alerts and blog-tracking services has lessened the ability for big media sites to appear unique. And that affects all of the reporters working today who are between the ages of 22 and 32, because they feel that bloggers are their colleagues."

Disclosure: The author worked with PaidContent editor-in-chief Rafat Ali and the site's co-editor, Staci Kramer, at Inside.com in 2000-2001. He is also friends with Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch and and in fact spent Saturday watching Clinton Portis and the Washington Redskins vs. the Tampa Bay Bucaneers with him. Leitch is also a co-managing editor of The Black Table with mediabistro.com editor Aileen Gallagher.