Well, yes and no. Something might be in the public domain, but it if is buried in a box of other documents, someone still has to go find it.

Whether this qualifies as that proverbial box of documents is, of course, another question. I have to assume that, given the high profile nature of the filing, this would have been found by others eventually.

Except that no one said a word for three weeks afterward.

By the way, I’m not trying to play down the fact that Eric Turkewitz was on this story first. He beat the mainstream media by about three weeks. He wins.

It’s kind of like the way movie and television studio executives refuse to read unagented scripts. If 500 people send them scripts, chances are that one of them will be close enough to the plot of their next project to lead to a lawsuit, so they never read anything.

Ain’t no thing.

Some journalists are blog-haters—perhaps because they’ve been attacked in the blogosphere—but I think a lot of journalists these days understand that some bloggers are sources they can use.

But with most stories on my beat–if there’s a wrong door raid in the news, a big police abuse case, a forensics case, etc.–a half dozen or more people will send me the same link before I check my email in the morning, which makes hat-tipping all of them sort of tedious.

There are also of course times when people send me links to stories I’ve already been planning to post about.

But in general, I do try to give credit when someone sends me something I haven’t seen elsewhere. But I’ve also probably neglected to more than a few times.

Maybe.

I do think journalists are getting more comfortable with citing bloggers as sources, but they still vary greatly from one to the next. I would have expected The Times columnists to resist blogger citation across the board, but they seem to be getting comfortable with it. On the other hand, I think Tribune columnists have been slower to adopt blogger citation practices, even when they are writing their own blogs. Zorn, for example, seems kind of reluctant to cite sources.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/24/sotomayors-ethical-oversight/?feat=home_editorials

Kovaleski was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning team that reported on the Spitzer prostitution scandal. Why would he have to steal from a local blogger to cover a national story?

Do you think that might be the reason why it’s embarrassing for a “real” journalist to have to get his stories from a lowly blogger. By the way, the Washington Post did an editorial on the issue a few days earlier, and cited to Turkewitz. Maybe WaPo didn’t get the memo?