Last week, USA Today’s Doyle Rice wrote a story about a research project in which I was involved. Rice did what journalists do. He got wind of a topic that interested him, tracked down and interviewed the lead researcher, got and read the paper, interviewed others for perspective, and wrote a story.

Four days later, David Roberts wrote a blog post on The Nation’s web site on the same study. Roberts did not ask for a copy of the paper, or interview the lead scientist. Instead, he cut and pasted from Rice’s piece into his own. Roberts tweaked the cutting and pasting with parenthetical insertion and paraphrase. Nowhere did he mention Doyle Rice, link to Rice’s original story or offer any credit or attribution to Rice.

The norms of journalism and blogging are different, with large gray areas as one melds into the other. It has never been clear to me which of those worlds Roberts inhabits. But by the norms of either community, using someone else’s words and work without attribution is wrong.

I wrote to David two days ago asking about this. I have received no response.

Click through for full excerpts:

Rice’s original:

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends….

“I was surprised that global warming was so dominant in the peer-reviewed literature of the time,” says Peterson, who was also a contributor to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report….

However, as Peterson notes in the paper, “even cursory review of the news media coverage of the issue reveals that, just as there was no consensus at the time among scientists, so was there also no consensus among journalists.”

Roberts:

Forthcoming in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the study “surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. [Study co-author Thomas] Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.” Added Peterson, “I was surprised that global warming was so dominant in the peer-reviewed literature of the time.”

As for the popular press, says Peterson, “even cursory review of the news media coverage of the issue reveals that, just as there was no consensus at the time among scientists, so was there also no consensus among journalists.”