Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?

With adequate tools for making the sourcing process as effortless as possible (see Jeremy Ashkenas' and Scott Klein's comments) it ought to remain an optional value-add for publishers: those who don't mind having their sourcing restricted to press releases, effort-obscuring generalizations or PR-driven 3rd party referencing won't encourage technologies that would enable their newsrooms leverage their in-house professionalism, regardless of its potential.

Linking/referencing is fundamental to good, original content, whatever the medium (see randlet's comment). If publishing software won't support easy source accreditation (particularly in a web-focused, hyper-linking context), journalists and editors are going to lose out - either by facing a 'keep my job vs. best practices' drama or by becoming disillusioned with the chance of success their organization has in maximizing the credibility of the staff input going into evolving their brand itself.

Taking their access to low cost, more modern publishing tools as a given, perhaps in more dynamic/educational reporting environments they should exploit software with prompts - asking authors to confirm that their content is 100% lacking of any derivative work, sources, or any mere cursory reference to any other material/commentary out there. This might even help less experienced journalists off-set some of the responsibility they have in bringing new ideas to the attention of their demanding readers ('this is my article, but here's some source curation for you, while I get my story straight'). Of course software that assumes any kind of pedagogical role is just as likely to become demonized by journalists who resent tools for their antiquated inefficiency. There's a fine line.

Services like DocumentCloud are vital in all this. As ilamont points out, there are also practical hurdles to overcome: even if you have the technology and inclination towards sourcing best practices, if you're running an online publication there's still the knee-jerk reaction to want to obscure your primary source, in case it out-performs your own content and thereby undermines your credibility. That's a question of quality and self awareness, though. The credibility loop will eventually hit your property, one way or the other.

Also, it's hard to publish links on the radio.

Finally, I think you missed his point- not all news organizations are going the tabloid route.

My answer, as a former journalist, is that whether or not that would count would depend on how well the reporter prepared for the interview. Good preparation for an interview of a scientist who just published a news-making paper would be reading the paper before the interview.

It's just as easy to cite papers on the radio as in print to make the paper findable, by saying something along the lines of "a paper by A. Smith and B. Jones published in the 1 April 2001 issue of Science." That's not a complete citation format, but Goldacre's complaint in the blog post submitted here is about mentions of papers where perhaps an author was mentioned, and perhaps a journal title was mentioned, but the date of the paper was not mentioned, and a link to the paper found in a press release was not reproduced in the online version of a print publication that often carries links to other online content.

After edit: I agree with you that you are responding to an exaggeration in a comment to the submitted article, with an example of a news organization that does better at fact-checking than the news organizations mentioned in the submitted link, and I too think there are happy exceptions to the tendency in some places for journalism not to cite published research. Here's wishing for more journalism to emulate the best current examples of careful research and meticulous citation of sources.

No.

If you're reporting on science, for example, the interview is unlikely to provide sufficient information. The interview is information for telling a story. Why? Because journalists aren't subject-matter-experts - they're story-tellers.

> Finally, I think you missed his point- not all news organizations are going the tabloid route.

You miss the point. The fact that some news organizations don't trade coverage for access does not imply that those organizations are producing good news. It just means that they're not committing a specific (albeit common) sin.

In other news "both sides don't like my coverage" does not imply "my coverage is good/fair/balanced/etc".

However, it would be nice if you provided a link to all of the interview, not just the results of your edit.