On Campus - by Dene Chen on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 16:54 - 7 Comments - 45 views
10/9: Update Below
On Monday, Corey Kilgannon, a blogger for the New York Times City Room, wrote about a hearing for Jason Nicholas, a 38-year-old freelance photographer who was arrested for violating his parole. Though the blog cited the Times 2007 article of Mr. Nicholas, it failed to recognize that Mr. Nicholas, an NYU graduate, was previously profiled in the Washington Square News by Andrew Nusca.
Mr. Nusca, who blogs at The Editorialiste, wrote that “it’s frustrating when a Times blogger makes mention of the Times’ previous story (”Look! We’ve covered him before!”) without also giving credit to the person who originally discovered the story and broke it.”
Upon reading all three articles carefully (the first written in WSN, the next in the Times, and the last one blogged in City Room), it is apparent that though they center around the same subject, each article shows a different stage in Mr. Nicholas’ life.
Mr. Nusca’s article speaks of his colorful past, and how he can look into the future because NYU gave a chance to overcome it. The Times article, written by Colin Moynihan, focuses on his life of being a tabloid photographer, and on his problems with the authorities regarding some of his methods. And finally on the blog, Mr. Kilgannon wrote primarily about Mr. Nicholas’ potential 14-month imprisonment for violating parole.
For the Mr. Nusca, I believe his frustrations rests on the fact that since Mr. Kilgannon had cited the Times article in a quick, clickable link, he should have also referenced that Mr. Nicholas’ had been previously written about in the WSN in a just as quick, clickable link.
However, since all the stories are technically unrelated to each other in terms of events, it seemed natural that Mr. Kilganon would refer to an article that ran in the paper that he worked for.
How far back should news organizations go when they are talking about a story that has been previously covered by another paper? We see often in the news, “The situation was brought to attention by (insert other publication’s name here)” or something like that. Reporters may kick themselves for not breaking a story, but they certainly always reference other publications when they write their own new findings on it. But sometimes, such as in the case of the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, many newspapers do pick up on a story and just run with new information without citing the original publication that broke it.
Think about it: If asked who originally broke the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal story, most readers are inclined to say the Post because it appeared in its pages every single day for a long time. However, it was really the New York Times who broke it on their website, right before Mr. Spitzer held a conference to confess and apologize.
Maybe this is also a question about the scope of the story and how widely it affects the public. Perhaps for something as huge as the Spitzer scandal, there can’t always be a previous reference in every single article written (and there were a lot – a tedious, unnecessary amount). But for something small and almost-insider-like, there should be properly acknowledgment.
My feelings are still confused on this general issue. However, with this particular case regarding Mr. Nicholas, I am disappointed that Mr. Kilgannon didn’t link to the WSN article on his blog. It would have been a thoughtful gesture that would have taken barely two seconds.
10/9 Update:
A comment from New York Times City Room Editor Patrick LaForge:
Nicole,
Please forgive the confusion. I personally added the link on Monday after the commenter noted its existence. But it appears that link dropped out in a subsequent revision of the article, so I have now restored it (second paragraph) where it was relevant.
I did this as a courtesy, and a service to our readers, who probably never read the original article. We did not view it as an issue of giving credit, however, since the topic of the WSN article was about the graduation, not the photographer’s later parole troubles, which was the subject of the Times coverage. But we do frequently link to the WSN and other media sources and were happy to do so in this case. Linking is what blogs are all about.
Incidentally, I found this discussion only because you happened to link to us. No one attempted to contact City Room’s editors, nor did we receive any formal complaint, beyond an anonymous comment (which we published). In journalism, one typically expects to be contacted about accusations. Even so, I think we have bent over backwards to respond fairly. If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at cityroom@nytimes.com.
Patick LaForge
City Room editor
Photo by Andrew Nusca/WSN
7 Comments
Patrick LaForge
Hi Mr. LaForge,
We took another look at the article in question (this one, yes?), and we can’t find any link to the Washington Square News, except in a comment left by Mr. Nusca. If you can show us where the link is, we’ll be glad to run a correction.
Nicole,
You are correct in your assessment. There is no link to the WSN story.
The only additional link that appears in the City Room blog post is one to an article by Lincoln Anderson in Downtown Express, not the piece I wrote in the Washington Square News.
You raise a good point in this post with regard to the etiquette of attribution. For right or wrong, my thinking was not that it was a rewrite of my article, which it was not, but rather the easy assumption on the part of the reader that the Times first wrote about Nicholas — after all, the first two grafs of mine and Moynihan’s story are quite similar, even though they take a different turn at the nut.
I remember finding out about Nicholas from a friend. I remember walking through the night of the crime with Nicholas, cracking jokes, taking his picture. I remember being excited at getting the scoop on this interesting story, ahead of papers as small as The Villager and as large as the New York Times, not easy as an undergraduate journalism student. Young as I was, I wrote the hell out of that story — I think it still stands as my longest clip for WSN.
So yes, in a link-happy blog like City Room — particularly internal links, naturally — I was looking for a little love on behalf of the tiny WSN, circulation 10,000. Online attribution etiquette is much different than the printed word, with so much more space available and words doubling in function as both content and doors to more content. An extra link to a local paper (or two, in the case of the Downtown Express) should have run the first time, in my opinion. By any measure, the City Room post was not brief.
It strikes me that, with the exception of paraphrasing exclusives from other places, City Room bloggers tend to publish with internal links first and external second. So while they like to say that it ends up as a nice 50-50 internal-external link spread, most NYT readers only catch the internal links when they read it the first time.
The City Room blog is a powerful publishing act, and comes with a lot of responsibility. It has become its own publication, in a way. Most New Yorkers first catch local stories there, in aggregate. That power is great; yet it’s often disappointing when the blog begins to function as a nice in-house advertisement, simply reposting and promoting stories that can’t fit on the front page (that’s what the NY/Region section is for, isn’t it?). I imagine it’s a tough balancing act — but I’d sure like to see more stories from smaller papers and magazines in the city, like the West Side Spirit or Chelsea Clinton News, that may not have as strong an online component.
After all, the Times gets to monetize those eyeballs either way. What’s to lose? Everyone wins — that’s the mantra of web etiquette.
Perhaps my attribution criticism ought to have been directed at the original article, with neglected the attribution, and not the subsequent blog post, which was another step removed from my story. But as you said: With each additional reference, the origins become more concealed.
Perhaps I was simply looking for “City Room readers may remember Mr. Nicholas, who was the subject of a profile in in The New York Times in 2007 and in NYU’s Washington Square News in 2005.” After all, a little modesty wouldn’t hurt the Times, would it?
A David vs. Goliath situation to be sure.
Best,
Andrew Nusca
The Editorialiste
While we’re talking about proper attributions, I should point out that Dene Chen was the writer of this story, not me.
I’m eager to hear back from Mr. LaForge – hopefully he’ll show us what he meant.
Patrick LaForge
Nicole,
Please forgive the confusion. I personally added the link on Monday after the commenter noted its existence. But it appears that link dropped out in a subsequent revision of the article, so I have now restored it (second paragraph) where it was relevant.
I did this as a courtesy, and a service to our readers, who probably never read the original article. We did not view it as an issue of giving credit, however, since the topic of the WSN article was about the graduation, not the photographer’s later parole troubles, which was the subject of the Times coverage. But we do frequently link to the WSN and other media sources and were happy to do so in this case. Linking is what blogs are all about.
Incidentally, I found this discussion only because you happened to link to us. No one attempted to contact City Room’s editors, nor did we receive any formal complaint, beyond an anonymous comment (which we published). In journalism, one typically expects to be contacted about accusations. Even so, I think we have bent over backwards to respond fairly. If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at cityroom@nytimes.com.
Patick LaForge
City Room editor
Mr. LaForge,
We thank you for your response, and we appreciate your courtesy of linking the WSN article. However, we made no accusation against City Room – we simply found Mr. Nusca’s blog entry and picked up on it. The issue wasn’t that Mr. Nusca wrote about the exact topic previously, but that it would have been courteous to link his article. As you said, linking is what blogs are all about, so it hardly seems that you had to bend over backwards to do so.
Nevertheless, we’re glad that this has been resolved.
Agreed. And apologies to Nicole for incorrectly attributing Dene Chen’s article to her. The irony does not go unnoticed.
Best,
The Editorialiste.
http://editorialiste.blogspot.com/
Leave a Reply
Hi,
The blog article in question does in fact link to the Washington Square News article.
We were unaware of that article — which, as this post notes, is not about Mr. Nicholas’s current legal troubles but about his past and his graduation. When a commenter pointed it out, we added the link, within hours if not minutes of publication. It is our policy to credit other sources, and we have.
Patrick LaForge
City Room editor