Having very prominently complained just last night that a slew of mainstream media outlets were ripping off stories that Paul Kiel and Justin Rood broke at TPMmuckraker.com, I want to thank the Times’ John Broder for prominently and graciously crediting our role in yesterday’s Howard Kaloogian flameout. But let me practice what I preach. We were in the mix almost from the beginning. And I think we helped advance the story a lot by dissecting various obvious problems with the photograph, doing one of the first interviews with Kaloogian and others, etc. But the unraveling didn’t begin with us.
To the best of my knowledge it got rolling with this post by diarist ‘anthonyLA’ at Kos. And it was another Kos diarist, ‘jem6x’, who finally put the whole matter to rest by uncovering the other picture of the street corner outside Istanbul.
This is also a good opportunity to make a point related to my post yesterday about attribution. Often, it’s not that easy to disentangle or dissect just how a story got started on the web. Often they start ‘virally’, as was the case here. My point in flagging this issue yesterday wasn’t to ding other reporters for the occasional mistake. ‘Getting credit’ has never mattered much to me at TPM. And ‘credit’ is often very complicated in how stories get started on the web in any case. But the two reporters I hired at TPMmuckraker.com are doing a lot of wholly original reporting — stories that are theirs from the ground up, and ones a lot of work goes into. My point in pressing this issue last night wasn’t to hassle the occasional oversight or misunderstanding, both of which happen with some frequency between conventional news outlets. My point is to call out the assumption among too many reporters that original reporting on the web amounts to free pickings, a separate class of journalism they can snag and call their own. That’s gotta stop.
