In the early days of the Web, when we were just getting Salon off the ground, we noted with amused snorts how big media outlets were unwilling to credit anyone doing original work online -- they'd prefer, when they bothered to acknowledge a source at all, to use vague attributions like "a Web site" or "on the Web."
These days Salon gets somewhat more respect. Hey, it's only been ten years we've been doing our independent journalism thing -- not long enough to belong to any clubs, assuming we'd even want that, but enough to warrant a named-attribution tip of the hat, some of the time.
The rise of blogs has occasioned another turn of this same wheel. Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (and new TPMMuckraker spinoff) regularly breaks news on those stories it focused on, notes with amusement today that the New York Times won't actually credit his site for a scoop about documents relating to bribery in the Dusty Foggo/CIA/Cunningham/Wilkes imbroglio.
The documents simply "appeared on the Internet Tuesday," the Times story says. Apparently they simply materialized.
This is like writing about the Times' scoop on NSA spying by writing, "News of the program appeared on paper last month."
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