Message to News Outlets: Cite Your Sources

Here at FHQ, we go to great lengths to cite any and all sources we use in our posts. Please call me vain or a gloryhog, but I prefer to be called an academic that operates under a standard where sources are cited and expects some measure of reciprocity in return. Where FHQ is vulnerable to being accurately called vain, perhaps, is in the fact that we regularly check our site stats. I'm unapologetic about being a stats -- of any kind -- nerd.

That said, I take note when IP addresses from various news outlets pop up. This morning it was CBS News (via Sitemeter):

Look, I don't want to make too big a deal out of this, but I do want to point out this continuing trend (The AP routinely hangs out at the site and someone at the Daily Rundown was on the site for quite a while a couple of weeks ago researching prior to a rather feeble roundtable discussion of the primary calendar situation. Yes, I complained about that, too.). But someone from CBS was on the FHQ this morning at around 10:45 and lo and behold an article appeared on CBS News an hour and a half later. Now, sure that's only 49 seconds, but Sitemeter tabulates time between clicks, not overall time spent on the site. In other words, it doesn't accurately depict how long said CBS employee was on the site. But you'll notice that Texas (the search term via Google) and Super Tuesday are layered into the discussion in the item. And furthermore, the next stop was the overall 2012 presidential primary calendar.

I have worked amicably in the past with several other sources that have done their due diligence on this front. I appreciate the efforts that those at Politico, The Boston Globe, The LA Times, The Fix (at The Washington Post) and The National Journal among others have made in not only talking to me in the past but in citing FHQ in their posted items. I only wish there was a uniform standard that was used and applied across all outlets.

I will continue to raise this issue when these incidents occur. I've worked hard to put together a resource that all can and should be able to use if properly attributed.

Thank you.

Josh

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