April 28, 2005 9:45 AM

Should Rupert Murdoch have credited Prensky for central idea of his speech at ASNE?

A reader contacted me after my column about Rupert Murdoch's excellent speech at the convention of American newspaper editors to find out whether he had credited Marc Prensky for "the phrase digital immigrant, digital native."

My column had praised Murdoch's speech. The reader pointed me to this 2001 essay by Prensky, which clearly was the subject of some discussion when it was published.

Here's what Murdoch told the editors.

I quoted this excerpt in my column.
"Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary," he told the editors. "Yet, as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent. Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.

"Well it hasn't. . . . It won't. . . . And it's a fast-developing reality we should grasp as a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach.

"I come to this discussion not as an expert with all the answers but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you in this room, I'm a digital immigrant. I wasn't weaned on the Web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They'll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband Internet access.

"The peculiar challenge, then, is for us digital immigrants - many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated - to apply a digital mindset to a new set of challenges.

"We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from and who they will get it from."

Should Murdoch have credited Prensky? I think it's a close call. And I think it's clear that he didn't try to claim that he had invented the phrase. But it's better in journalism to err on the side of crediting others for their ideas. It's also more gracious. Imagine if he had quoted Marshal McLuhan, for example. If he had said, "The medium is the message," without quoting McLuhan I think most would agree that would be wrong. Even if an idea isn't as well known as McLuhan's, don't we owe its creator the same acknowledgment?

Good speech by Murdoch. Congratulations to Prensky for the concept.

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