A few months ago, my brother wrote a story about a woman who passed away and left 2,000 descendants. He wrote it for a small-ish newpaper that serves the Hudson Valley in New York. A few weeks later, the New York Times wrote nearly an identical column and even used one of the photographs from the original story. Clearly, the author had learned of the story though my brother's article. My brother and his local paper were never mentioned in the article, and I wrote a huffy blog post about it.

I understand that this happens all the time. Journalists and editors don't come up with ideas for stories out of the ether. They get story ideas from other newspapers and from conversations with others. They also get a lot of ideas from the blogosphere. If there's a lot of buzz about a topic in the blogosphere, that topic will be in the media within a week. I've seen it happen quite a bit, and journalists have admitted as much to me.

It's just annoying that the media doesn't give credit to the source of ideas, especially ideas that are in printed form in other newspapers or in the blogosphere. It's more than annoying. In academia, we cite EVERYTHING. Everything sentence will have a long string of citations. In the blogging world, we always provide a link to the where we first read the article. It's bad form to not include that "hat tip."

Lately, there has been a call for major media to embrace the hyperlink and to give credit to idea sources. See Alex Weprin and Danny Sullivan.