PressEthic

How often do you read a particularly complex story with sources contributing from all over the world, and ask yourself, "how on earth did one reporter speak to all those people in all those places?"

Of course, some reporters, especially those in broadcast who may have larger budgets allowing them to travel more profligately, will have spent weeks questioning sources across the US and beyond. But when working to tight deadlines on timely stories, many newspaper reporters rely on their junior colleagues for information and quotes from far-flung locations. In the past, these more junior reporters may not have received sufficient accreditation for their work, there being no legal obligation in the United States for attributing information when received from people working for the same organisation.

This seems to be changing.

I wonder whether the increasing accountability to which journalists are being held, by both the public and litigous objects of their reportage, is behind bylines such as the one below from a New York Times online story I read this afternoon:

Ralph Blumenthal reported from Houston for this article and Jennifer Bayot from New York. Reporting was contributed by Rick Lyman, Maureen Balleza and Christie Taylor in Houston; Margaret Toal in Orange, Tex.; Laura Griffin in Dallas; William Yardley in Baton Rouge, La.; Timothy Williams in Beaumont; Terence Neilan and Andrew C. Revkin in New York, and Eric Lipton in Washington.

Senior reporters, such as Ralph Blumenthal, may or may not be irritated that the byline is no longer exclusively theirs; the point is moot, and only relevant in a discussion of journalists' egos. Perhaps this change in approach, which seems to me to have been gradual, can be put down to the nature of online reporting, with its constantly changing deadlines; it allows input from more sources to be assessed and then published.

It is clear that information, presented as news, is in effect a commodity, to be traded, bought and sold, but not stolen. While journalists in the past have been diligent in the attribution of information to external sources whenever possible, it is, to my mind, only recently that editors have started to attribute as fully as in the example above. Credit where credit's due.