In Saturday’s edition of the Tampa Bay Times, there is a story titled, “Cancer remark sparks outrage” written by reporter Danielle Paquette. It outlined how a comment by Pinellas GOP state committeeman Dan Tucker referencing County Commissioner John Morronis battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma “outraged” some Tampa Bay officials.
Paquettee’s work is a classic example of what the Times describes as “re-reporting” — a brand of journalism in which a story that originates on a competitor’s website is “re-reported” without any attribution of the original source. It’s definitely not plagiarism, it just sucks for the original source — in this case my blog — because a simple tip of the hat would make the whole process palatable.
This story came to me from five — FIVE — different sources on Thursday. I blogged about it four separate times. I engaged in a full-throated debate about Tucker’s comments on Facebook. I got the first quote from Senator Jack Latvala, whom Paquette also quotes (in fact, the subject line of Latvala’s email to me was, “Its your story…”).
In other words, the “outrage” Paquette writes about can be traced to SaintPetersBlog. So much so that when Paquette’s colleague, political editor Adam Smith, blogged about Tucker’s comments he included a link to my story.
That’s all I would have liked from Paquette,
Instead she writes as if this story was created in a vacuum.
