PUTTING THE FREE IN "FREE PRESS":

A few days ago, I followed up on a story about British Prime Minister David Cameron getting a custom-made iPad app to monitor real-time stats and news from around the U.K. The original story was broken by the Times of London, which famously went behind a paywall in 2010. Since reaction to the story was skeptical, I rang my sources in Westminster and confirmed that work on the app had been under way for a few months. That was that.

Then, as I watched the story continue to spread, I noticed a few things.

First of all, most follow-up reports didn't give credit for the original story to the Times. Many nodded to a different British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, which had basically lifted the story from its rival and republished it.

In a world whose media often accuse news of "over-aggregating," the Telegraph (first published in 1855) has issues: Over the past few years a large number of individual reporters and news organizations have complained to me--sometimes officially--that Britain's biggest-selling "serious" daily paper has systematically appropriated their work online and not given credit.

It's unethical. It's a fact of life. Fortunately, there are still ways to get the right credit out there.

On Twitter, the Times reporter who broke the story, @SamCoatesTimes, tweeted it once and got a little traction. As more active users pushed the Telegraph version and others, the credit went elsewhere as versions of the story spread.

The Times was hit by a triple whammy. Because the original story was hidden behind a solid paywall, most people who heard about it or were writing tertiary reports couldn't access it. And because the Telegraph chose to minimize credit for the story it had lifted, it was able to fool readers into thinking it had originated the story. The Times wasn't out in public, owning the story, so it lost at every step.

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