By Sven Larsen (@zemoga)
At the beginning of September, the Associated Press (AP) sent this announcement to its member news organizations.
What it says, in short, is that blogs are now to be credited as legitimate news sources.
Wow! Look at us, a legitimate news source. Our moms will be so proud!
But after reading it a bit more seriously, the announcement sparked quite a few questions around here. You can understand why, of course. Its true that here at Zemoga and Palio were more thinkers and tinkerers than we are hard-nosed investigative reporters, and Pixels & Pills reflects that. This isnt the blog you come to for moment-to-moment breaking news, and we hope youve learned that when you come here were going to give you our opinions much more often than we are going to tell you “this just in! Heck, we hope thats why you come here!
But, still. What if we were to break a story? We want to know how this is going to work!
So heres what weve been wondering. Wed love to know what you think about this. Wed love to know what your questions are. And wed love to know if youve managed to find answers to any of these questions. (We havent!)
1. How will the AP format the credit? Theyre very particular about standardization in formatting (for proof of this, just see every writers favorite, “The Journalists Bible, the AP Stylebook). Will a blogger news credit include just the blog title? Or will it include the URL of the blog, the post authors title, or some combination of the above?
2. What was the proper way to credit the information before this announcement? Did an AP writer attribute it to the post author as a person, or did they just take it into advisement as one source and proceed without attribution?
3. How will they attribute news broken on Twitter? What will that formatting look like?
4. How will the AP handle blogs who clamor for the newswire to run a correction when they were, in fact, the blog to post the news first, not the one that the journalist saw and credited with breaking the story?
Even with all of these questions still to be answered, we do like that the AP has taken this step. Frankly, its about time. (Hey, I said we always had an opinion.)
Were proud to be part of the blogosphere, and we work hard to be a useful, legitimate source of information for you. Its gratifying to see such a prominent news organization acknowledge that that exists in the world.