I was thinking about the importance of attribution today after reading Mike Glover's take on the issue in his post on the coverage of Bin Laden's death and the "outrageous gullibility of the media in the wake of the Bin Laden incident".
It's a thought-provoking piece of writing and well worth a read. (Also, incident is a great word, isn't it? Covers everything from the reported death of the world's most wanted man to a pub brawl).
Anyway, attribution of information when constructing a story is vital; journalists tend to be the questioners of eye-witnesses, rather than eye-witnesses themselves. Sometimes we're several links down the chain, and sometimes the report of several statements gets prosed into appearing as a presentation of stone facts.
Tempering a slew of facts with acknowledgements that the information has come from a third party is helpful for readers, I suspect, but attribution with regards to content is an equally thorny issue.
YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitpic, Facebook, Twitter, Storify, ManyEyes visualisations... just a tiny fraction of created content that lives on the internet, in the wild, that journalists can use to source or display information. But when it comes to reusing this work - the attribution - it's so important to show genesis, or at some point the accusations of making a smash-n-grab raid on social networks will come.
I'm probably a little obsessive about attribution, or showing source as a) I would hate to be accused of pillaging other people's content and b) it's easy to get permission or show original ownership. Things like a quick tweet exchange over the use of an image on Twitter, a link back to the video owner's YouTube page, a link and a nod to the person who made the Storify you've embedded or the ManyEyes vis - so quick, so simple. So courteous.
Flickr is a different matter; I wouldn't use a Flickr photo on this blog without checking the Creative Commons licensing and giving clear attribution. Professionally, I wouldn't consider a Flickr photo unless the owner had given me express permission (either by joining a group with a consent form - like the Liverpool Daily Post's Flickr group has - or through direct contact.
It's a thought-provoking piece of writing and well worth a read. (Also, incident is a great word, isn't it? Covers everything from the reported death of the world's most wanted man to a pub brawl).
Anyway, attribution of information when constructing a story is vital; journalists tend to be the questioners of eye-witnesses, rather than eye-witnesses themselves. Sometimes we're several links down the chain, and sometimes the report of several statements gets prosed into appearing as a presentation of stone facts.
Tempering a slew of facts with acknowledgements that the information has come from a third party is helpful for readers, I suspect, but attribution with regards to content is an equally thorny issue.
YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitpic, Facebook, Twitter, Storify, ManyEyes visualisations... just a tiny fraction of created content that lives on the internet, in the wild, that journalists can use to source or display information. But when it comes to reusing this work - the attribution - it's so important to show genesis, or at some point the accusations of making a smash-n-grab raid on social networks will come.
I'm probably a little obsessive about attribution, or showing source as a) I would hate to be accused of pillaging other people's content and b) it's easy to get permission or show original ownership. Things like a quick tweet exchange over the use of an image on Twitter, a link back to the video owner's YouTube page, a link and a nod to the person who made the Storify you've embedded or the ManyEyes vis - so quick, so simple. So courteous.
Flickr is a different matter; I wouldn't use a Flickr photo on this blog without checking the Creative Commons licensing and giving clear attribution. Professionally, I wouldn't consider a Flickr photo unless the owner had given me express permission (either by joining a group with a consent form - like the Liverpool Daily Post's Flickr group has - or through direct contact.
