News organizations sometimes find that the road to journalistic hell is actually paved with good, or at least benign, intentions.

Take the case of the Greeley (CO) Tribune.

For a number of years, the Tribune has been taking stories from other regional papers and posting them on the website as well as in the newspaper itself. The practice began while online editor Chris Cobler was the paper’s editor. Click here for a story from the Coloradoan about this controversy.

So far, not a problem. But the Tribune rarely if ever, attributed the stories to the other newspapers. Instead it added the Association Press as the source for the stories, even when they weren’t.

The staff figured that since all the papers are subscribers to AP and since AP was likely to distribute the stories anyway, why not just eliminate the middle editor and do it themselves?

That was an ethical problem according to the other newspapers whose stories were being taken without attribution.

The practice of “AP attribution” began a number of years ago, when Cobler was the Tribune’s editor. It only came to light last month when two other newspapers brought the matter to the attention of the Tribune’s publisher and asked that it be stopped. The publisher agreed.

It’s not clear how the practice began and Cobler is quoted as saying that it was “newsroom folklore” that the AP gave the Tribune permission to engage in the practice.

Randy Bangert is the Tribune’s editor. “We had been doing it for many years under the assumption that it was OK to do,” Bangert wrote in an online column. “I couldn’t pinpoint when we started it. It was almost a decade. Basically, no other newspaper said anything and AP didn’t say anything, and no one objected. It became a part of our routine.”

Obviously the intention was a good one: fill up the paper with lots of regional stories. The unintended consequence was that someone from another paper would see their story without a byline and complain. For years, the “system” functioned for the benefit of the Tribune until someone blew the whistle.

The revelation has roiled newspapers in Colorado, but it is likely that this practice occurs in other parts of the country and in other media besides print.

Broadcast news is particularly susceptible to this because of time restraints. If a newscast has only a few minutes, it’s often deemed to be a waste of valuable airtime to state the source of every fact. Broadcasters subscribe to wire services (AP, Reuters, AFP) and frequently report what the wires have said without the need for attribution.

However if a wire service breaks a story, then it is only fair and ethical to give credit to the source. But stories on the wire which repeat facts that appear obvious or that have been reported elsewhere (“The President will spend the weekend at Camp David”) hardly need sourcing. In broadcasting, adding the phrase “according to the Associated Press” could sound silly and be a waste of airtime.

In my experience, there is often a confusion in many newsrooms about what constitutes “public domain” information and “fair use.”

This is an important and complicated legal situation and news editors should consult with their General Counsel for more clarity on this. It’s also important to remember that the Internet does not provide any greater allowance of either “public domain” or “fair use” information.

The Tribune probably isn’t alone in this practice. Journalists frequently argue about how much can be put in the paper, or in the newscast, without attribution. This isn’t because of some inherent journalistic propensity to moral laxity. It’s usually an attempt to squeeze as much information into the newspaper or the broadcast as possible. But attribution is both an ethical and a journalistic requirement. And these days when the public thinks that “journalistic ethics” is a contradiction in terms, every effort has to tell the public where the story originated.

It’s also only fair to our colleagues who worked to get the story in the first place.

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