Felix

Here’s why I’m so angry at Julie Moos’s unjustifiable attack on Jim Romenesko: the way that she’s so fucking certain that she’s right and he’s wrong, and the way that she hammers this home over and over again:

I now know that Jim Romenesko’s posts exhibit a pattern of incomplete attribution…

Too many of those posts also included the original author’s verbatim language without containing his or her words in quotation marks, as they should have…

It is incomplete and inconsistent with our publishing practices and standards…

Our practice is… While I have no reason to believe this practice has spread beyond one writer… guilty of the same shortcut….

Some of you may find it abhorrent and a journalistic sin…

It is incumbent upon the writing and publishing team to signal the reader as clearly as possible. We did not…

Proper sourcing and attribution are required across all story forms…

How long has this been going on?…

How often, how consistently and universally did we articulate our values and standards and confirm that others share them? Not enough. Never enough…

They are not seeking, nor do they deserve, to have their words used without proper credit…

Effective immediately…

And then — then! — after all this, Moos has the termerity to write that “We are in uncharted territory, marked by uncertainty, which suggests caution.” I’m sorry, Julie, but it’s way too late for that.

Jim Romenesko is a KING of the blogosphere. He’s the kind of person you should be looking to as an exemplar of best practices in the blogosphere. If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines. You do not throw him under the bus like this just to get out in front of a CJR piece.

For shame.