I’m a little bit exhausted from all the controversy this week, so hopefully this post won’t be controversial (I’m crossing my fingers).
I was trawling the Internet this week, via Google News, for stories I could use on my beat, namely animal and zoo stories having a San Antonio connection. One of the queries I submitted was “san antonio zoo.”
I linked to my first zoo story in a previous post. Imagine my surprise to find this blurb:
Zoo has trouble feeding family of 900
Kansas City Star, MO - Jun 24, 2008
The Kansas City Zoo is not alone in this pinch. The San Antonio Zoo busted its food budget by 39 percent in May, and the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Ariz., …
That “39 percent in May” is directly from my story — a number that I reported, i.e. taking notes during a phone call.
So, out of curiosity, I clicked through to read the story.
It’s a really great story. It has more details and it’s a bit more in-depth than mine was.
But note the Kansas City story’s lede:
“Like other shoppers, Liz Harmon must cope with rising grocery prices. But Harmon has more than 900 mouths to feed.”
Funny. Now take a look at my lede:
“Rising food prices might make it difficult to buy a week’s supply of family groceries, but imagine having more than 3,500 individuals to feed.”
Of course, that’s the obvious lede for this story. The more pressing question is the figures. I found a Missouri broadcast media station that cited the Kansas City story’s figures without attribution.
And look at the publication dates: June 13, June 24 and July 1.
My story ran June 13.
With the Internet, the world is your beat. The lines are getting blurred as to what is acceptable and what is just inserting local tidbits into another newspaper’s story.
I want to be clear: I don’t think that that happened here. It does trouble me, though, that newspapers are starting to use figures from other sources without attribution. Broadcast has been ripping stories from newspapers for ages — but since it’s a different medium, it wasn’t viewed as competition in the same way. I have a problem with print media jumping onto that same bandwagon. How can we verify the accuracy of stories if we don’t do the reporting, and especially if we don’t attribute the source?
Maybe the Kansas City Star did call the San Antonio Zoo, but frankly, I doubt it. I think it crosses a dangerous line to begin that practice. It’s a slippery slope from not attributing sources of facts to outright plagiarism. The Internet makes it easy to find national angles to stories, and I think that’s great. I just think it needs to be clear where the information comes from in the first place. Otherwise, we lose a lot of our credibility.
I’m flattered that my story was good enough to contribute to the Kansas City story. After all, I was always told by reporting professors to “localize” national stories for class.
But if I hadn’t attributed a figure that I got from the New York Times in a story for my reporting class, I would have been in trouble.
That’s the difference.
