Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart gave MTV in June, responding to the “boycott” of his publication by a handful of fanboy sites who insisted that the trade had repeatedly failed to properly credit their “scoops”? Variety’s Anne Thompson resurrected the debate and the Bart quote this morning in a blog post pegged to Comic-Con, where a gang of outlets of various sizes––including us––will be fighting to post the same material at the same time. If my post about The Watchman goes up 20 seconds after Cinematical’s, will I get in trouble for not giving them “credit” for “breaking” the story? What’s the netiquette??!!???

She’s mostly looking at the divide between a “legit” outlet like Variety and the independently run sites like Film School Rejects, but I think Anne makes some good points about this stuff not being the black-and-white matter of thievery that some of the sites would like to believe. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key part of her piece:

It’s not always cut-and-dry–sometimes everyone is chasing the same news and a given reporter may not be aware of what has broken online. A reporter isn’t always tracking down where something broke first, just the story itself.

On the one hand, in saying that a Variety reporter tracking a story may not even know that it “broke” online, the implication is that Variety reporters have better things to do than obsessively read every little junket jockey’s blog looking for “scoops” to “steal.” Not something the puffed-up boys of the blogosphere want to hear, perhaps, but maybe not unreasonable.

But the story also points to a difference in approach between the blogger and the journalist. Thompson notes that, in the case of the Collider/300 sequel incident that motivated the boycott, the Variety reporter dug up extra information that made the initial report richer and more valid. This is what bloggers do every day––taking over where one of us left off and taking things further––but when we do it, tracking the bread crumbs back to the start of the meme and being transparent about the trail is part of the process.

At least, it is for good bloggers.