Good points although I'm not sure the technology basis is at the heart of it. Bloggers are equally bad about linking to primary sources. Back in 2008 I traced

Good points although I'm not sure the technology basis is at the heart of it. Bloggers are equally bad about linking to primary sources. Back in 2008 I traced several stories from the first reports via the tech and politics blogospheres to the mainstream media, and in almost all the cases the primary sources had vanished a couple of articles into the chain. X writes something on NewsVine; Y writes about it in Wired (linking to X) and then it gets on Slashdot or Reddit or HN; Z writes about it in the New York Times -- and links to Y, but not X. Agreed that time is a lot of it, but it's also a matter of how people want their articles to look. What's more important, linking to the original source or buttressing the story's credibility by highlighting that it's reported in Wired? Both! But it takes a lot of work to craft a sentence that reads smoothly and allows you to link to both stories (and even then it may be very hard to fit in the authors' names) and very few authors consistently make the effort.