This raises a process question for me.

Is it non-kosher for S-R journalists to rewrite a series of wire feeds/articles from other places as a bylined 'news story'? So long as sources are acknowledged for included statements of fact?

Generally, wire stories run pretty much as-is (spelling/style corrections aside). We can edit them for accuracy, clarity or rearrange information for local focus (i.e., moving a Washington reference higher in the story). Sometimes (though seldom) we'll combine information from multiple wire stories (events in Iraq, for example) into a single story, in which case the byline is usually pulled.

We'll sometimes combine information from a staff writer and a wire story on the same topic. If it's a small contribution from one or the other, a tag such as "the Associated Press contributed to this report" will be added at the end. If it's closer to 50/50, the byline will be changed to "from staff and wire reports."

Today's science story doesn't necessarily support the accusations that the White House is manipulating science. Insofar as I can tell, the study only identifies freqency of errors, not their causes. The errors cited in the study could be due to negligence, not pressure to alter results). To connect the dots between these two stories would be strictly out of bounds.

That said, I don't think journalists in general do a good job covering science stories. There is a tendency to take preliminary studies and trumpet them out on the front page before they've been replicated and peer-reviewed. That's why there's so much conflicting information about whether or not oat bran/antioxidants/chocolate will cure cancer/make you fat/fight wildfires.

Science takes time - a long time - and the news cycle doesn't always have the patience for it.

Thanks for the explaination. I wrote a piece on my blog arguing that journalists might better serve readers by acting more like remix artists/DJs than by just pasting whole wire stories up. Take all the recent science stories on the wire; let a writer get ahold of them and report in brief on a lot of them and then connect the dots in a compilation science/news report. Attribution could be half/half or whatever (or source by source like more like a term paper) and might get a lot more info out than otherwise.

It's great to know how it works, so coming up with ideas that might be silly or unworkable can be evident to me (and other readers I hope).

Thanks.

Doug - this (remix) is going to be a super-big deal in citizen journalism, if not professional journalism. I suspect the citizens will go first ... soon, too.

There will be some copyright issues, but they will be overcome or routed around.

There are some huge copyright issues, depending on how it's done. The legal framework for hyperlinking is still in the oven - one could argue that it's the equivalent of citing sources in a research paper, which seems to be the more prevalent view. On the other hand, if I clip out a bunch of articles from different newspapers, paste them all onto a single sheet, put my name at the top and publish it, it's clearly plagiarism.

The role of asking "what does it all mean?" is currently held by analysis pieces. We do get a few analysis articles on the wire, and our own reporters, most notably Jim Camden, will write them from time to time. They generally take a back seat to news reports, though one could argue it should be the other way around.

Of course, the value of an analysis varies directly with the author's knowledge of the subject, and anyone who participated in high school debate knows how easy it is to re-arrange the same facts to arrive at polar-opposite conclusions.

It's a perfectly legitimate role for citizens to take - after all, if people aren't synthesizing and applying information and talking abou it, there's no point in publishing it. I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with newspapers taking on that role as a primary function, though.

To digress further -- researching a news story can take weeks, even years if you factor in the time it takes to cultivate sources. For someone else to spend 30 minutes or less cobbling it into a "remix," and expecting it to have the same, or greater, relevance than the original report is a concept that is understandably insulting to a lot of professional journalists. If newspapers find themselves losing readership and/or relevance in this way, they can easily respond by cutting off the pipeline of free reporting via the dreaded subscription firewall.

Ken:

All good points and easily overlooked by the we-media. Like me.

Personally, I don't believe hiding content behind firewalls will, as a practical matter, work. There will be too many available open sources for primary/secondary news that are more than good enough as far as readers are concerned.

On the other side, draconian copyright also cuts off noses to save faces. And doesn't work either.

The marketplace, subtly but not crudely regulated, will probably operate over time to develop an 'etiquette' for remixing that blends original writing and integration of existing sources with appropriate citation/linking.

I say this, having learned (and not always to my own taste either over the years) that self-evidently do-able Web-ish things like this have a way of just plain sweeping away the obstacles.

The fault lies in the oddly wise decision that the military made at the very beginning of the Internet's architecture. The Net is strangely re-routable and redundant (designed to survive nuclear war); it remains oddly resistant even today to global regulatory efforts. If we're lucky, all in all, this will continue for many years.

I say this as someone who warns fellow-travelers that the same laws that will over-regulate porn will over-regulate religious speech worldwide as well. Journalism/political speech too.

Getting somewhere reasonable to all parties with remixes will be messy, I'm sure.

What if S-R led the way in defining the etiquette and how-to of journalistic remixes as a legitimate form of (secondary news) reporting?

Someone will.