Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?

I've noticed this on KPCC in Orange County, CA - sound bytes from a mayor's speech that's being covered, or a quick interview with someone at HBGary after the whole Annonymous attack. On one level these sound bytes are superfluous, they don't add anything beyond what the reporter is already telling us. But in addition to adding new voices to the newscast, it also assures the listener that the reporter was at the mayor's speech, has talked to people affected at HBGary, that we're not just getting regurgitated news stories as are so common (as pointed out by this article). Even the news story about Guitar Hero being cancelled had sound clips from "music experts" about the effect the game had on popular culture (essentially, his kid likes classic rock and roll now when he never liked it before) - that had limited news value, but real exclusive added value for the radio station.

So KPCC is one example of a news organization doing things above board.

KPCC is one of our stations.

Honestly I think this has as much to do with the process of news publishing and the systems and software they have in place to manage it.

I worked at a newspaper for 5 years, and their editorial system - this would be the software that reporters write their stories in, editors edit the stories in and proof readers and copy editors lay out pages in, not to mention ad placement, classified pagination and much more - was pushing 10 years old when I started. It wasn't integrated with the website content management system. It was slow, outdated and very annoying.

But it worked, everyone new how to use it, and we knew that we would be able to publish multiple publications every day, 365 days a year. The fact that the system wasn't fully integrated with the CMS meant it was difficult to add links to stories, usually requiring going into the CMS and hand-coding links, after waiting for the publishing scripts to grab the story and post it, a process which could take up to 30 minutes, depending. Typically an online editor or copy editor, far removed from the research and work the reporter had done, would manage this for the entire website, since it makes more sense for the reporter to be out on the street doing actual reporting.

So the 'simple' task of adding a link isn't as simple as it seems when placed in the context of a fast moving newsroom. Typically the battle isn't "why isn't there a link to that source document?" but rather "what do you mean you can't get anybody to speak on the record" or "we need a story for the 1A centerpiece now."

And then the next day the same battles start all over again, the process repeats and another newspaper is printed. It's difficult to change the process because the process is so critical to meeting print deadlines to be able to deliver papers on time.

To add to this, newsrooms are getting cut down at the same time they have to do more. My newsroom once had ~60 people at a time when all they did was print the paper. When I left, it was about half that size and we were posting regular online updates, tweeting, linking to stories from facebook, monitoring comments online, posting photo galleries, shooting video and creating interactive flash presentations on top of it all.

So, yea, if the reporter has time, he reads the report. If it's a story about calf length, it's more likely he'll skim it to be able to bang out a space-filling (or traffic driving) story. And since it's a light human interest story, and not something that's likely to get the paper sued, it gets a quick once-over proofread, then posted to the internet ASAP, then printed, and everyone is on to the next big story to feed daily monster that is daily publishing.

I still think some of these organizations will get there. The New York Times is leading the pack, but the slower publishers will take awhile to replace their antiquated systems and change the daily process that has been refined and perfected since the dawn of the printing press. Of the ones that don't, new organizations that can manage the digital realm will replace them.

Good points although I'm not sure the technology basis is at the heart of it. Bloggers are equally bad about linking to primary sources. Back in 2008 I traced several stories from the first reports via the tech and politics blogospheres to the mainstream media, and in almost all the cases the primary sources had vanished a couple of articles into the chain. X writes something on NewsVine; Y writes about it in Wired (linking to X) and then it gets on Slashdot or Reddit or HN; Z writes about it in the New York Times -- and links to Y, but not X.

Agreed that time is a lot of it, but it's also a matter of how people want their articles to look. What's more important, linking to the original source or buttressing the story's credibility by highlighting that it's reported in Wired? Both! But it takes a lot of work to craft a sentence that reads smoothly and allows you to link to both stories (and even then it may be very hard to fit in the authors' names) and very few authors consistently make the effort.

Did you work at the same place I do now(small-town paper in the Pacific NW)? Being the sole developer there, I can absolutely confirm this. And since I was hired to write the website CMS, most of my days resemble the assembly line segment from Chaplin's Modern Times.