Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Steve Buttry published a blog post Sunday lamenting the fact that traditional news outlets often fail to credit one another for stories they pick up, repurpose, or in some cases simply regurgitate from other sources.  Buttry cites a tweet from Des Moines Register reporter Daniel P. Finney complaining that KCCI took one of his newspaper’s stories and read it on the air without attribution.

“Newspaper ethics tend to do better about direct ripping off the competition,” Buttry writes. “Plagiarism is a career capital offense, so if we can’t advance a story or find the same sources to duplicate it, we reluctantly attribute.”

Buttry’s post is frank and honest, but he left one option off his list of common newspaper practices: skipping over a story entirely if there’s no way to write it without crediting another news organization.  That’s a pretty common one, too.

It may be true that in the world of traditional journalism, newspapers are better at citing original source material than broadcast media, but in my experience, most of them are bound by an arcane set of rules designed more to promote their commercial interests than to pursue the truth or inform their audience.

The news business is becoming less and less profitable all the time.  If there were any actual commercial benefit to avoiding citations of other news outlets, I would have a hard time faulting anyone for it.  But what good do they derive from it?

When the Des Moines Register cites the Cedar Rapids Gazette in print, do they lose subscribers?  Advertisers?  The two newspapers serve two distinct media markets, more than a hundred miles apart.

What if local TV newscasts cited the Register each time they cribbed a newspaper story?  They might sound funny having to cite the same source for nine out of the ten stories they feature, but it is unlikely that businesses are going to stop running television ads in favor of print ads, or that somebody will turn off the tube and curl up with a day-old copy of the newspaper to get their news.

I could ask the same hypothetical questions about whether there are legitimate reasons to avoid crediting nonprofit, online-only news outlets that regularly break news stories, but I’m done tilting at windmills for the day.

The Iowa Independent has been credited in print and on the airwaves by the Washington Post, the BBC, National Public Radio, and FoxNews (just to name a few), but to the best of my recollection, our name has never been uttered in the pages of the Register or in any local TV newscast.  If we ever do get local publicity (for which we are sincerely grateful), it is usually in the form of a novelty story about this new hobby called “blogging” — nothing that actually validates our work as journalists.

After a year and a half editing this site, I’ve made my peace with how the world works.  I can see the Iowa Independent’s footprint in the work of other local journalists even if casual readers, listeners, and viewers never will.