Chalk up The New York Times with a debit for not giving a credit.

The newspaper makes a small but not insignificant transgression by not name-checking a wire story in its Street Scene column.

Last week an item about Warren Buffett, bankers, and “poetic justice” appeared on the interwebs and in various newspapers following a speech on Wednesday in Toronto. CBC reported on it. Bloomberg reported on it. Reuters reported on it. The Reuters story was on the wires that afternoon with the money quote.

“It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end,” he said in reference to some of the large investment banks that were involved in designing and marketing complex investments that have soured in recent months and have generated billions in losses.

Reuters updated with a full 500-word story with the byline Wojtek Dabrowski, which was printed in various newspapers on Thursday.

The Times, like many other outlets, had the Reuters wire story on Wednesday evening online and also featured the item, again attributed to Reuters, on its DealBook blog on its Web site.

By the time it was published in the Times’s print edition on Friday, there was no reference to Reuters or any other wire service. Appearing in its Street Scene column that runs with the sub-head, “Highlights from DealBook at nytimes.com/dealbook,” The column led with an item headlined, “Warren Buffet: What Credit Crisis?” It does not appear online, so we’ve included the entire item, as it ran in the newspaper below:

Warren Buffett: What Credit Crisis?

Warren E. Buffett has largely dodged the subprime mortgage mess.

But that is not stopping him from taking shots at Wall Street banks that helped sow the seeds of the disaster — complex mortgage investments. Many of those investments have gone bad, leaving investors and the banks with large and growing losses.

“It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end,” Mr. Buffett said at an investment conference in Toronto this week.

But for all the angst on Wall Street, Mr. Buffett does not see a squeeze in the credit markets. ”Money is available and it’s really quite cheap,” he said.

Mr. Buffett attributes the turmoil in the financial markets to the evaporation of ”dumb money.” By this he means the investors who chased tricky investments backed by shaky home loans, as well as complex corporate debt that is now almost impossible to sell.

With the dumb money out of the market, a wide range of companies, from investment banks to bond insurers, have been left high and dry. Not that Mr. Buffett minds: Berkshire Hathaway set up its own bond insurance business last month, and he can borrow money now at more attractive interest rates. MICHAEL J. de la MERCED

On Friday, Merced told us that while the Reuters story tipped him off, he went to a Bloomberg terminal where he listened to the audio of the event and wrote from that.

“It isn’t something we’d dealt with before,” said Merced. “Will we look at it and try to form a firmer policy? Yes.”

Fair enough. Not the end of the world. But news organizations that go to the trouble and expense of staffing news events should be acknowledged.

Give credit. Otherwise it’s a debit. Get it?

We’re a little disappointed in the Atlantic this month (except for a cheeky, category-defining article making the case for women over thirty to stop thinking of settling as a bad thing and “Marry Him!”)

Another article in the March issue (but not online), “The Next Slum,” gets a debit for twisting a current, transitory event into evidence of an epochal shift in the American landscape.

The story, by Christopher B. Leinberger, which runs with the subhead, “The subprime crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements,” has a compelling lead:

Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

The problem here is, these woes are very clearly—and almost totally—caused by the housing crash that has pushed borrowers out of their homes and caused investors to mail their keys to the bank and walk away. The Atlantic would like you to think it’s because of the renewed vitality of our urban cores.

We don’t think so. The magazine quickly—and very conventionally—veers into a paean to Return to the City, well-plowed ground for journalists for many years now. This is a real phenomenon, and a welcome one.

But suggesting that suburban McMansions will be carved up into tenement buildings before too long stretches the evidence, we think. A great deal of Americans will always want the increased elbow room that only suburbs can provide them, and these less-dense landscapes are fairly easily adapted to new uses.

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