If you haven’t spotted it already, read Danny Sullivan’s blog post about the mainstream media ‘stealing’ his scoop – the story about a woman suing Google, alleging that bad directions had resulted in her getting hit by a car.

Sullivan documents the various ways his story for Search Engine Land was picked up by mainstream titles, and raises complaint with the way material was used.

…News is messy. But we should all try to do better attribution.

Following on from the post, the UK-based blogger and PhD student, Daniel Bennett, broadens the discussion to one of methodology: how to monitor the way mainstream media uses blog content, if they don’t attribute it?

…If blogs and indeed other sources of other news are written out of media reports how can we accurately measure their influence? It seems to me that relying solely on content analyses to assess the impact of blogs on the traditional news media is highly unreliable.