By now, you have probably read some of the stories written about the two shootings in St. Paul earlier this month, many of them reported and written by the staff at the St. Paul Journal.
The Journal reporters did a great job keeping up with this story as information came available and even broke some of the news, keeping readers aware, informed and up to date.
But it wasn't just the Journal reporting on the events, as big media outlets like CBC, the National Post, Sun Media and other Edmonton TV stations and newspapers swarmed St. Paul over the past few weeks.
Following those large media outlets, as I have the Journal, I was becoming frustrated, as specific outlets took information, including direct quotes from the Journal without providing the proper credit.
Some articles I stumbled upon from two larger newspapers took quotes from the Journal's stories and sourced them only as coming from “a local paper”.
I happen to know that St. Paul “local paper's” reporter Ryan McCracken was at the scene of the incident shortly after 6 p.m. getting the details of what happened and talking to witnesses.
He kept working on the story, posting updated versions to the “local paper's” website throughout the night before attending the midnight press conference at the scene of the shooting. He left shortly before 3 a.m. to write an updated version and then was back at it the next morning and afternoon attending other press conferences and tracking down the latest info. The reporter for the “local paper” put a lot of time and effort into obtaining the information and yet his work was taken and used and for his efforts the paper taking the quotes was too lazy to give a proper attribution.
Specifically, it was two big-city daily newspapers that had no problem going in, taking his quotes and lazily leaving the reader guessing which reporter did the actual work. Heck, they didn't even credit the paper it was printed in. It just doesn't seem right.
What do journalists have to do to get the credit they deserve? What does a “local paper” have to do to be shown a reasonable level of respect?
It's easy. If a newspaper is printing a reporter's work with his or her name on it, both should be given credit.
I thought it was common sense to credit sources. If you are taking information that was acquired by someone else and published by another company, you give that person and that company credit for that work you are using.
In saying this, several media organizations stuck closely to this rule; I read articles by the National Post and Edmonton Sun that gave credit to St. Paul Journal for the quotes and information they used.
But the two big-city papers for some reason felt the need to disrespect the St. Paul Journal and their reporters by not giving credit where credit is due.
Community papers perhaps play a different role than large corporate media outlets, but “local papers” like the St. Paul Journal have great, hard-working and professional journalists that deserve respect and credit for the work they do.
