Former journalist here. Some years ago I attempted to create a standard called "Source Blocks" (see http://www.ilamont.com/2008/11/my-new-journalism-experiment.... ). It's basically a paragraph of explanatory text that the author places at the end of the article, identifying what sources he/she used in the course of researching the article. It looked something like this.
Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Blog.basturea.com, American Journalism Review (ajr.org), Editorsweblog.org, Glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com, Techmeme.com, thelongtail.com, Washingtonpost.com, Wired
The problem was, even without linking these sources, it took discipline to keep a running list while work was being done, and/or time at the end of the writing process to do the source block writeup. And the system did not account for higher "weight" for certain sources, much less the details that came from each source. It attracted a little attention, but I was only able to keep it up for another year.
At the time, someone suggested creating some sort of browser extension to track all of the sources, which might have helped a little with other websites but would have been useless for phone or F2F interviews that occupy many journalists' time.
It's not hard. Firefox under Unix has an interesting property. When you select text, you end up with the following targets for an X Window select operation:
With this, I was able to add an extension to my editor to obtain the URL, pull the page, pull the title and generate an HTML BLOCKQUOTE with proper CITE attribute with the highlighted text included.
Google and other search engines then take this into account in rankings, as do social media sites, etc. creates a machine readable hierarchy of attribution
this gets discussed endlessly and i've switched off from the conversation, I am more interested in getting google, twitter et al to support the microdata, the publishers and CMS providers will fall into line thereafter
Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Blog.basturea.com, American Journalism Review (ajr.org), Editorsweblog.org, Glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com, Techmeme.com, thelongtail.com, Washingtonpost.com, Wired
The problem was, even without linking these sources, it took discipline to keep a running list while work was being done, and/or time at the end of the writing process to do the source block writeup. And the system did not account for higher "weight" for certain sources, much less the details that came from each source. It attracted a little attention, but I was only able to keep it up for another year.
At the time, someone suggested creating some sort of browser extension to track all of the sources, which might have helped a little with other websites but would have been useless for phone or F2F interviews that occupy many journalists' time.