Hi, Dan,

The book, along with this chance at a type of collaboration you are offering to your readers, is going to be a great experiment.

For your Part III, Chapter 8, I think the Agonist story you wrote about earlier provokes some interesting questions for “Making the News”. At the beginning of the new Gulf War, Sean-Paul Kelley, the guy behind The Agonist, made a decision to sit in front of his computer as much as he possibly could, aggregating news from websites, radio, TV and any other information sources he could get his hands on. He’s a graduate student down in Texas, with a wife who reads and writes Russian. For those of us without the time or the inclination to hunt for nuggets of truth amidst all the bias and web-slag, his site was a real find. I’m not sure how many of us staked out his site at the beginning of the hostilities, but I don’t think any of us had any illusions that his sources were anything other than other media outlets; the value he provided was collection and presentation. His role wasn’t much different than Paula Zahn’s, except that his sources were more varied and I doubt he smiled as much when he reported enemy deaths. Does anyone believe that Paula herself is developing primary sources? Isn’t it clear that Zahn is presenting her colleague in Qatar, who is presenting the guy embedded with a particular unit, who is then presenting to us what the military allows him to say?

Perhaps people visiting the site later believed that Sean-Paul’s mysterious references to “little birdies” or “unnamed” sources were bonafides, but these lapses in attribution can just as easily be chalked up to Sean-Paul’s personal voice — humor and an air of espionage. My assumption was that some of his sources were from reader emails; in fact, half the value of Kelley’s site was the wealth of comments from readers: they verified reports, suggested new sources, added new items, and contributed breaking news during the breaks Sean-Paul’s biological nature required of him. Give it ten years of development and research and Google News may be capable of providing this service for the next Gulf War, without the bathroom requirements.

Blogs aren’t “journalism” — at least not in the American “objective” sense; to judge them by the standards of professional journalism is to do both a disservice. Blogs depend on journalism, serving as an echo chamber for the good stuff, a debunker for the garbage, and a collection point for the stuff which may have been overlooked in our info-glutted culture. For a pro, mis-attributing or claiming another’s work as your own is both unethical and proof that they are not doing their job properly. For an amateur, its more of an ego-stroke than anything harmful, akin to the guy at the water-cooler using Ebert‘s words to describe what he “heard” about the movie he hasn’t yet seen. “Plagiarism” is the term that’s being tossed about, but I think plagiarism would require that Kelley attributed the work to himself, which I don’t believe he did, any more than Al Gore attributed to himself the creation of the Internet.

As for the charge that Sean-Paul was “stealing” information from Stratfor: that’s a tricky one. Can information be stolen? Are thoughts, ideas and knowledge property which can be owned by one person? Once Stratfor releases the information to its subscribers, can Stratfor rightfully determine who those subscribers may or may not relay that information to? It also leads into the question of “fair use“: how much of Stratfor’s text could Sean-Paul copy-and-paste as fair use? Many bloggers — Lisa Rein comes immediately to mind — copy entire articles and save them to their own websites in order to comment on them; Kelley took snippets and clips. According to the developing code of weblogger ethics, he should have attributed the excerpts to Stratfor. When it was pointed out to him, he apologized, then immediately began attributing every article, went back into his archives to attribute all un-attributed information and worked out an amicable arrangement with Stratfor for using some of their material.

There are some ethical lapses here, but nothing horrible like the recent spate of professional newspapers quoting other newspapers without even an attempt at independent verification, as in the (overblown) flap about General William Wallace’s assertion that “enemy tactics had been ‘a bit’ different from what was war-gamed against beforehand”. In failing to verify the quote with the General, many newspapers repeated someone’s original error and left out “a bit”, suggesting that the US armed forces had been porrly trained and were in danger due to foolish assumptions. And it is certainly nothing like Fox News partisanly using its Times Square news ticker to taunt war protesters with insults and slurs.

Many of the people who posted heated rants on Kelley’s “The Agonist” comments board said that, in light of the revelations that he had “stolen” content, they could no longer trust his information or rely upon his data. This is a touchy-feely reaction with no basis in reality: no one has questioned the veracity or reliability of any of Kelley’s or Stratfor’s reports, merely whether Kelley properly credited them. This has no bearing on reliability. Every major newspaper has a “Corrections” column running nearly every day, and consisting mainly of corrections to misattributions of photographs, authors and sources. Few people would claim that the New York Times is no longer reliable because its editors forgot a photographer’s byline. (In this respect, conscientious bloggers are more like print media in that they frequently correct their mistakes with updates to the original articles or post new entries reporting their errors; contrast this with the lack of corrections in television journalism.)

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this episode, other than it is still very early in the history of this new medium to understand exactly what should be the distinctions between journalists and bloggers and how they should ethically act and interact. I’m sure Gillmor can analyze this better than I can.