Andrew Sullivan got his link (although Sullivan is hardly your average blogger).  In fact, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz published private emails Andrew Sullivan sent to Michael Goldfarb, a McCain campaign spokesman in which Sullivan asking for proof of Trip Palin’s parentage.  Kurtz should take some major heat for this.

A while back, Jill Miller Zimon brought my attention to survey of U.S. journalists conducted by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom Group (NYSE: OMC), that reports on the influence bloggers and new media are having on mainstream media journalists. From Taking the Blogosphere Seriously , the blog by Jerry Johnson, head of strategic planning at Brodeur:

Blogs are a regular source for journalists. Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.

Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.

Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.

The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

The summary of the survey is available here. Some not so surprising, but still tantalizing results from the summary:

• 78.3% of journalists surveyed report “getting story ideas and news angles” from blogs.
• 76.2% of journalists surveyed report “getting insight into the tone of a debate or discussion” from blogs.
• 31.6% of journalists surveyed report “identifying and validating news sources” from blogs.
• 27.7% of journalists surveyed report “finding quotes and soundbites” from blogs.
• 25.4% of journalists surveyed report “getting ’scoops’ or exclusive stories” from blogs.

The most important aspect of Brodeur’s report for our purposes at Can I Get A Link Please? is account for those journalists who get their scoops, find quotes, and validate news sources using blogs, but forget to credit bloggers for that information. Is there any part of Brodeur’s report that you find surprising?

Turning the tables on the Associated Press, Blogger Michelle Malkin took some time to track down instances when the Associated Press printed direct quotes from her website without proper attribution and uses the AP’s new pricing scheme for “Excerpt for Web Use” to tell them how much they owe her for using her material.

B.L. Ochman exposes the New York Times for not giving journalist credit to a blogger for a scoop in a case where it’s clearly due. After last week’s Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana case in which the court ruled that the death penalty was not an appropriate penalty in the case of child rape, Dwight Sullivan of the CAAFlog pointed out that Supreme Court Justices missed a recent congressional statute in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 that “…expressly authorizing the death penalty for the rape of a child.”  Ochman points out that the NYTimes doesn’t credit Sullivan for the scoop until the fourth paragraph of their story.  Dwight Sullivan of the CAAFblog did get a link, but he didn’t get headline credit for breaking the story from the New York Times.

Since the recent dust up between some bloggers and the Associated Press over the definition of free use and proper sourcing, many members of the blogging community now recognize the importance of pointing out when their content is either referenced or quoted by mainstream media publications without proper sourcing.

Linking is what makes content on the internet move, and although a lot of bloggers sell themselves and their original content short, original content deserves to be sourced properly. It was the amateur bloggers that created this system, so it’s the mainstream media that must adapt to its conventions–not the other way around. If the Associated Press thinks it’s okay to try and re-frame online free use and sourcing conventions because it suits them one way, independent bloggers need to stand up and point out how it won’t. And one way we can show mainstream media publications that the conventions established over the past 20 years by new media pioneers benefit everyone is by reminding them that what works when sharing media is the sharing part.

So, send up your stories about being quoted without being sourced and we’ll publish them.