The guys at paidcontent.org are unhappy. Today the Wall Street Journal reported on a possible iFilm buyout by Viacom, a story paidcontent.org broke. Not a bad thing — expect the Wall Street Journal didn’t credit paidcontent.org.

They have every right to be angry. I had a similar experience happen to me several months ago. A TV station’s website posted an article (which I suspect was on their local nightly news broadcast) The article contained a direct quote from one of my websites which I had personally written. How did they credit me? As a “website.”

Online writers have been breaking stories since Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky - President Clinton story on drudgereport.com. (To be fair, the networks were sitting on the story at the time and he decided to let the whole world know about it.) Today the tables are turned and “big media” is regurgitating the stories that online bloggers and publishers are writing.

Getting credited in a major newspaper or other news media provides a huge amount of credibility to your website and maybe even a temporary boost in traffic. As an independent web publisher you need all the free publicity you can get.

Established “old media” companies are all struggling to succeed online. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been on a shopping spree this summer. First they dropped $580 million on Myspace.com and then $650 million on entertainment-network IGN.

The Wall Street Journal has been successful online for a very long time. It would be very unfortunate if their new strategy is to take all the credit for themselves and ignore the independent guys doing all of the work.

(update: the WSJ has issued a correction for this story)