Sporting Madness

As part of my ongoing effort to report on the Blogs With Balls convention I've been at for the past few days, I present coverage of the third panel, which dealt with access. This was one of the most interesting panels of the conference for me, as it dealt with a hot topic in the blogging world and one I'm particularly interested in as a journalist/blogger. It was moderated by Dan Levy of the excellent On The DL Podcast , and featured Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo!'s Puck Daddy , one of my favourite blogs, plus Mitch Germann , the vice-president of communications with the San Francisco Sacramento Kings*, John Karalis of the Celtics' blog Red's Army and Patrick Wixted of New Media Strategies (and a former Washington Redskins PR staffer). Here's a shaky cellphone picture of the panel. *Yes, I know the Kings are in Sacramento. Odd things happen when you try to write posts while sleep-deprived, such as mixing up California cities! [Left to right: Germann, Wix...

This is a bit of a continuation of my post on anonymity the other day, focusing on the mainstream media's relationship with the blogosphere. One of the big stories this week was about New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd apparently lifting a paragraph [ Craig Silverman , Regret The Error ] from Talking Points Memo writer Josh Marshall via a shady friend ( Alex Rodriguez 's cousin , perhaps?) and then apologizing for it afterwards. To Dowd's credit, she's been much more apologetic than certain other plagiarists , but her inclusion of a paragraph word-for-word from a friend without any mention that it wasn't her original work is still very troubling. The Dowd situation is just one extreme example of a larger problem, though. One of the things that's troubled me for a long time is the indifference shown by many traditional media outlets towards proper citation of others' work. A particularly egregious recent example comes from that noted bastion of journ...