From WNYKRKIN

From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On The Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Many news organizations have written policies for crediting other news organizations in their coverage, but there are also unwritten rules.

Scott Sugar writes the today's papers column for Slate.com and joins us once again.

Nice to have you back, Scott.

Hi, Bob.

I gather that reading the newspaper can be more revealing about the newspaper business than about the actual news.

You noticed something in the Washington Post this week.

Right. Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a story under the headline,

Field Offices, Assure, FBI, all McVe files are in.

The news of the piece doesn't actually appear until the sixth paragraph,

which is not really about the files per se, but is about a letter that appeared somewhere else

written by Timothy McVeigh.

The somewhere else was the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle had a letter that appeared somewhere else written by Timothy McVey. The somewhere else was the Houston Chronicle.

The Chronicle had a letter from Timothy McVeigh saying,

definitively, there was no John Doe number two,

which of course takes a lot of the steam out of the FBI file story.

And therefore is important and is important to readers.

But it was buried in the story and the story was

buried in the paper because it is a Houston Chronicle break. I mean, you know, if we were just going

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