Journalists are seeing red over yesterday’s Slate piece on rampant plagiarism. Writer Jody Rosen got a tip from a reader that it looked like a small alt weekly had lifted one of his stories. His research resulted in this fantastic piece: Dude, you stole my article.

As one who has had my hard-earned copy “lifted” by other publications, without attribution, I completely understand Rosen’s outrage and obsessive Googling to find more dirt on the Texas writer whose crime she reveals.

During my fun-filled year as a blogger for The Washington Post, I wrote about important neighborhood issues, like where the next dounut shop would open. Seriously, people ate this stuff up.

Soon after my column on a Fractured Prune franchise ran online and in the newspaper, I found a very similar article in a competing local paper.

“Humm…,” I thought, “That was fast, especially since I got the tip from one of our correspondents and there was no press release. And the quote is exactly the same as the one I had, but the business owner didn’t seem like the kind of guy to have stock answers so early in his game…”

So I called the Troy Parkins, one of the franchise owners, and asked him if they had talked with any other media. He said no, he had not talked with any other reporters. I poured over the copy in both articles again and kept thinking… is this or is this not plagiarism?

Read and see for yourself. (I would normally copy and paste an excerpt of the articles in block quotes here, but the full story is needed to make a judgment.)

My “Living in LoCo” version: Hot Donuts Are Coming! and Leesburg Today’s version: Fractured Prune Donuts Coming to Town

Mulling this over for a day, I decided to reach out to the competition. Our local editor made the call.

A day later I got a call on my home phone from “Mike,” who had put the other story together, apologizing but in backhanded way, as if he really didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong. I remember him saying something along the lines of… well I read your column and get ideas, but I went to their web site and got the information myself.

Except the Fractured Prune web site didn’t say anything about who owned the new franchise or where the locations would be at that time. (It did have the history of the name and the product.) And when I confronted Mike with the knowledge that he did not actually interview the person quoted, he just said “sorry” again and quickly rang off.

A simple link with attribution to my column would have made this whole issue moot.

Plagiarism is more inexcusable on the web because writers can credit sources with a link.

Bloggers created this new form with linking out, typically with credit, to other sites — supporting and encouraging people to go to that other site. This behavior is the exact opposite of “walled gardens” we all created in the late 90’s to keep readers within our sites (and unfortunately, this practice still persists in some places today).

On the web, there is value in creating an alternative to copying someone else’s work. When editors value link journalism and communicate to their reporters and writers that including links to their sources and giving credit where credit is due is as important as meeting a deadline, they will provide less incentive for plagiarism. This is the “ethic of the link.”

Consider this. Links also create more value around original content. So while there may be tens, if not hundreds, of blogs and sites referencing a big story, the links will all take them to the source — the reporter and publication that created the original content.

Clearly hyper local news about donut shops is the least of the world’s concerns. It is just an illustration that at every level, the lines of plagiarism and rewrite might be blurred. But do we journalists protest too much? Do readers care how a story came about, whether original or not?

You don’t even need to answer — just include the relevant source links and those questions become irrelevant.