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Media Blogger Romenesko Resigns After Questions About Attribution

Jim Romenesko, a blogger who pioneered online reporting about the news media, "has submitted his resignation" to the Poynter Institute "and I have accepted it," Poynter's online director Julie Moos writes.

"His decision," she continues, "comes after Poynter.org published a story about questionable attribution in Jim's posts."

Here's what happened: Romenesko, as we and others who write blogs such as The Two-Way, would often link to and pull from what other news outlets were reporting. But too many of his posts, Moos reported Thursday, "also included the original author's verbatim language without containing his or her words in quotation marks, as they should have."

So, she says, "words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another."

Romenesko had already been planning to go into semi-retirement.

This news warrants a word about how we handle material from other sources and attribution.

Basically, we try to be as transparent and clear as possible about where we're getting information and whose words you're actually reading. That's why you may sometimes see some awkward constructions and the use of double quotes and single quotes as we attribute passages.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.