There's a good rule of thumb in life: everyone makes mistakes.
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If you subscribe to that, you tend to allow people chance to correct their mistakes, and it's in that situation that you'll discover their true character.
Take the issue of using other people's photographs in your work. This morning, I found this article in my feed reader:
"That picture look awfully familiar, I though." Oh, yeah. Because it's one of mine. And it isn't attributed. The picture is Creative Commons licensed, so people are free to use it, but there's a requirement for attribution.
Fair enough, I thought. Techcrunch has made a mistake. Let's give them the chance to correct. I contacted the author, Jason Kincaid, via Twitter. And this was his response:
And sure enough, within minutes, my attribution was in place:
And that's a model of how to do it. This is the second time I've had to do this recently, and the reaction I've got both times contrasts sharply with that sometimes displayed by the mainstream media.
This is not hard. But it does require you seeing yourself as just one of a community of amateur and professional publishers. Why do traditional media types find that so hard?
