Agonist's agony
As one of the many bloggers who has praised Sean-Paul Kelley's site The Agonist for its timely feed of war news, I was disappointed to read of his admission that he reused significant quantities of material from Stratfor without attribution.
I don't know enough about Kelley to understand why this happened. But two conclusions from this affair seem pretty obvious: The first is that, while what Kelley did could have happened on a more traditionally edited news site, the absence of any kind of editorial review before publication gave him extra rope to hang himself. The second is that the editing still happens, only after publication, and performed, as it were, by the readership. This means that blogger-journalists don't have much of a safety net -- their errors and ethical lapses will get caught not as part of a learning or mentoring process between editor and writer, but in the glare of the public spotlight, before a general readership, after they have done whatever damage they are going to do.
What I simply don't understand is why any blogger would use unattributed material from another site and think that he could get away with it. One of the main values of blogging is the ease of linking; you can quote liberally, but always link back. If you got an idea or were made aware of a Web page or just happened to read something somewhere that sparked a posting, putting the link in is not only good ethics, it adds depth and usefulness for your readers.
There's an old saying in the editing world, espousing the virtues of concision: "When in doubt, take it out." (My friend Josh Kornbluth once wrote a whole song on the theme.) The bloggers' variation on this principle ought to be, "When in doubt, link it out."
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