The Rule Is...

Maureen Dowd told the NYT public editor that the Josh Marshall paragraph she used in her column without attribution came from a friend in an email, which explains why she didn't know it was from Marshall.
The incident created all sorts of anti-Dowd flaming in the blogs, but Marshall himself forgave her.
Still, the Times' public editor decides she should at least have attributed it to the source. He's right.
I mean, even bloggers have links. The right-thinking ones, anyway. Me, for instance.
Sullivan, I noticed long ago, double attributes, making sure the body of his copy also credits the source, and then linking. Sometimes he triple attributes, also crediting the source of the link when it's found at another site. I'm a little lazy about that.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said journalists collaborate and take feeds from each other all the time. That is true with news articles, but readers have a right to expect that even if an opinion columnist like Dowd tosses around ideas with a friend, her column will be her own words. If the words are not hers, she must give credit.

TRIVIA: Clark Hoyt, the Times' public editor, was the model for the beleagured city editor at the semi-fictional Baltimore Sun in The Wire. He was much beloved at that paper.