Anche per ricordare ai giornali on-line italiani di citare le fonti: le nuove “editorial guidelines for credit and attribution” di AP
In the age of the Web, the sourcing and reliability of information has become ever more crucial. So it is more important than ever that we be consistent and transparent in our handling of information that originated elsewhere than our own reporting. Therefore, here is our policy for crediting other news organizations in our reporting. This policy is aimed at introducing consistency to our practices around the world, and applies to our print, broadcast and online news reports.
The policy addresses two kinds of situations:
— Attributing to other organizations information that we haven’t independently reported.
— Giving credit to another organization that broke a story first, even when we match it — or advance it — through our own reporting. Attributing facts we haven’t gathered or confirmed on our own:
We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s U.S. based; and whether or not it’s an AP member or subscriber. This policy applies to all reports in all media, from short pieces, such as NewsNows and initial broadcast reports, to longer pieces aimed at print publication. It applies once we have decided that we need to pick up the material – and for those decisions, the usual judgments still apply.The attribution doesn’t always have to be at the start of a story or script; it can sometimes be two or three graphs down. But we do need to say where the information came from. If some information comes from another organization and some is ours, we should credit ourselves for what’s ours and the other organization for what’s theirs. (If the material from the other source turns out to be wrong, we’ll cite them in any corrective we do later.) It’s important to note that we shouldn’t use facts from a non-member news organization, even with credit, so frequently that we appear to be systematically and continuously free riding on that organization’s work.