One, notify the publication. Complain. This might seem lame, but readers are important. They have a voice and if they speak in large enough volume and numbers the publication must listen. I went to BusinessWeek and noticed they have a commenting system. I bookmarked and plan to return to that site and register. If I see this happen again, I’ll likely leave a comment complaining about it there. I’m assuming those comments are read by the writer of the piece. If not by them, hopefully somebody in charge is reading.

Vote with your feet. BusinessWeek just dropped to a much lower reading priority for me.I’ll now look for other sources besides them for similar stories to link in the future. As you know, a lot of stories are repeated across the wire and a choice can be made who/which/what stories to show attribution. In the case of which one picked it up off the wire first doesn’t usually interest me as much as who had the best perspective on the news. Often times it isn’t the MSM reporter, it’s a blogger from some corner of the world.

I don’t blame Slashdot because they are dealing on a high volume scale of posts with submitted entries and the editors there do not add links. Heck, they won’t even change the title. I understand their system and sometimes it benefits and sometimes it doesn’t. In the /. case, it’s not about /. so much as it is about those who submit the stories and who they choose to link. And also their system, like Fark, Digg, etc., relies more upon the community commenting than the brief and often incomplete summary itself.