Plagiarism, schmagiarism: Journalistic word theft slowly killing industry integrity

I remember the moment when I was first plagiarized. It was a special moment... finally I wrote something worthy enough to be stolen from me. 

It was a story about a man who robbed a Bank of America in 2010 wearing a bright blue yarmulke. One year after the incident the man remained unidentified and at large. The only evidence police had included a security camera photograph of the man stuffing a wad of cash into his jacket, and the testimony of the bank clerks. My editor, Josh Fisher, asked me to find out if the Darien police had any information on the guy. So I began making phone calls.

Three police officers received voice mails and emails from me over several days. Finally I figured out that he was caught in California, but I still didn’t have his name. More phone calls, more emails, more waiting. Nearly two weeks later I finally get all the details about this guy, his history, everything. We run the story as the lead on the front page.

The next day a competing news website had the same story. It was completely reworded, but not a single detail was in this scraped story that was not in mine — every detail I included, the other reporter included, and every element I omitted, he omitted. He wasn’t even around when the incident took place in 2010, in fact, his website wasn’t even operational. No credit was given either.

There is a certain amount of fury that comes with an experience like this. It's as if someone took something personal from you, like a family heirloom or, perhaps worse, some aspect of your self. After all,  stories are mere extensions of who we are as people, as individuals, and for a story to be taken and claimed by someone else is a cruel and unusual form of identity theft. The kind that bears fruit for the person who didn't even plant the tree.

Death of the deadline

By David DesRoches

  

Image via digitalcitizen.ca

Getting beat by a competitor with a breaking news story is part of being a journalist. It toughens you, whittles you down to your sharpest point, and fills you with fire to not let it happen again. 

When it happens with other stories — ones that might have taken months or even years to develop — the result is embarrassment. Why didn’t I see that? We might think. 

Few would argue that speed is not a driving value in the modern newsroom. But how important is speed when it comes to publishing news? Should accuracy suffer on account of speed? 

Traditionally, news was deadline-driven and only television or radio could break news in real-time. With the net, anyone with a connection can break news as it happens. This has essentially eliminated the need for a deadline, as news stories are often posted as they are written, with edits and updates amended as necessary. At the very latest, a news story will go live the day after it is written. Any longer than that and you risk being scooped. 

Sure we might still write to a deadline, or have a target for finishing a story. But the fluid nature of online news allows for constant updates and amendments and corrections and even conversations through the comments. Is an online story ever truly finished?

So rather than drive ourselves to be accurate, the rising tendency is to get it first and fix it later if it's wrong.

What does it mean to own a creative work in a global society?

By David DesRoches

Type “plag” in a Google search box and “plagiarism” is the first word suggested. Second on the list is “plague.” Some rough logic would indicate that people are more interested in or concerned about plagiarism than they are about the danger of plagues. It’s no certain science, but it’s a good argument for people’s preoccupation with the theft of ideas. Wikipedia’s definition of plagiarism is replete with contradictions, arguments over degrees, even disagreements over its very existence. The page is in constant flux — it was last changed the day before I penned these lines. 

Type “is plag” and Google suggests “is plagiarism illegal.” People, including yours truly, are also interested in knowing if stealing intellectual property is in fact a crime. Some other Google suggestions: is plagiarism illegal, is plagiarism a crime, is it against the law, is it wrong, is it a federal offense, is it a misdemeanor, is it illegal in the U.S., is it cheating, is it ethical, is it theft, and is it on the rise. 

Plagiarism is not illegal in the U.S., although it depends on the degree of the theft. If it violates the Fair Use doctrine than it is a violation of copyright law. Copyright rules for the Web are not clear because of the international nature of the internet. However, the U.S. is arguably more lenient when it comes to prosecuting claims of copyright infringement than other countries. Asya Calixto, a lawyer in Prince Lobel's media and intellectual property group, said that "there isn’t a rule of thumb when it comes to fair use, and that the doctrine is very case-specific."

In one case, Righthaven LLC vs. Realty One Group Inc., the court found that the use of eight sentences from a 30-sentence story was Fair Use in part because it took facts from the story and not creative interpretations of those facts. "The closer you get to non-factual interpretations, comments, or conclusions, the more likely it is that your use would constitute copyright infringement," Calixto said.

The postmodern plagiarist pushes journalism into a corner

By David DesRoches

Image (c) itfipvirtual.net

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea.”

– Comte de Lautréamont, 1870

This controversial quote sends chills into the spines of journalists who have been plagiarized. Most of us take ownership of the work our hands and minds create, if not legally, at least intellectually. But proponents of de Lautréamont's mantra might consider his acumen insightful. One person in particular, postmodern activist Guy Debord, was so enamored with this concept that he actually plagiarized the exact phrase, in French, in his 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle.

In the art world, stealing is often considered a form of flattery. For centuries, originality was shunned as art and literature were judged on how well the creator imitated the masters. But things changed as western societies entered the Romantic period, and an individual’s right to ownership of a creative or literary work became a value to rival society’s right to common property.

Aggregation tests traditional notions of sourcing and accountability

 By David DesRoches

 “A thousand bloggers all talking to each other doesn’t get you a report from a war zone. Somebody’s got to take a real risk... [and] gather that news originally.”

- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,

in Page One documentary

Media blogger Jim Romenesko gained a Twitter following of more than 45,000 people (and growing) by being a maverick paraphraser — a sensei in the art of finding interesting news and distilling it to its essence. His success germinated while working at the Poynter Institute where he helped pioneer an aggregation style that now permeates the web. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of hits to other websites, giving them free advertising through his enticing summaries.

           

In late 2011, Romenesko’s aggregation techniques became the subject of hot debate and derision when his boss, Julie Moos, posted a blog that challenged his practices and claimed his attributions were incomplete. She provided examples where Romenesko failed to include quotation marks around certain phrases within his aggregated story.

Correcting a correction and the power/danger of unverified facts

 By David DesRoches

Publishing an unverified fact is an opportunity to challenge traditional notions of power as it relates to truth gatekeepers. It is not, however, an excuse for sloppy journalism.

The danger of publishing unverified information made headlines recently, after CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers published a story that claimed Mitt Romney’s former employer, Bain & Company, was a consultant during the auto company bailouts overseen by the Obama Administration.

The story was pulled after Bain’s PR president challenged the connection, claiming it was incorrect and demanding a retraction, to which CNBC promptly abided. But then it was learned that the report was correct, and that the correction was wrong, as Craig Silverman notes on Poynter.com. So Javers wrote another story, but not before the webomino effect ravaged the blogosphere, claiming CNBC didn’t operate by basic journalistic principles of fact verification.

Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik was one of the more outspoken critics, Silverman notes.  Even after the original story was proven correct, many remained convinced that CNBC's failure to properly verify the fact was its cardinal sin. 

Within the firestorm of criticism, there is an interesting dichotomy: What if Javers had contacted Bain & Company successfully before he wrote the first story, but the company lied to him about the connection, as they obviously did in their retaliation to his story?

Pay-for-play and the reality of online news

 By David DesRoches

News outlets have a tradition of pleasing advertisers with content. In the private world of profit-making news orgs, few things are more prevalent, for better or worse.

An FCC-sponsored study called Information Needs of the Communities, led by Columbia Journalism Review's Steven Waldman, revealed just how ubiquitous pay-for-play can be in television. The FCC decided more transparency was necessary for the public to know where content comes from. But industry push-back is strong. Broadcasters and advertisers don't want change.

Waldman:

"...the organizations arguing against better disclosure represent local news operations—yes, the same news organizations that routinely (and appropriately) demand greater transparency from public officials. Can these local TV news organizations really be so tone-deaf as to demand greater transparency from everyone else but resist even the most rudimentary, common-sense forms of transparency for themselves?"

Bloggers vs. The Media: who tells us what's worth talking about?

 By David DesRoches

The following is a portion of a comment thread posted on Glenn Greenwald's blog that recalled an interview with NYU Professor Jay Rosen. In the interview, Rosen discusses mainstream media's "ability to infect us with notions of what’s realistic," which Rosen claims " is one of the most potent powers press and political elites have."

It's a snippet from a 2009 interview posted on Salon.com, and it's a great short read. Here's some relevant sections from the comments:

Me (some paragraphs omitted):

The Tea Party and the Occupy movements each represent ideologies that are more or less within the sphere of deviance. But the conversation, carried by the web, is pushing these ideas into legitimacy.

My question is, what role do journalists play in weighing fringe ideas when doing a story on a popular subject with two traditional modes of thought? Is there justification needed for bringing in fringe ideas, or can it just be done? Also, is it necessary to balance fringe ideas from either side of the political spectrum, or at least try to?

Live-blogging and its value to the greater society

 By David DesRoches

Steve Buttry and I engaged in an interesting back-and-forth on his website about the value of liveblogging. You can check out the full story and conversation on Steve's website. Here's some highlights of our exchange:

Me:

Oftentimes breaking news or live blogging has more value for media and news people/junkies than it does for the overall society. If a story must be broken because a storm is pending, or there is an accident or fire or emergency situation, or if timeliness is paramount, then speed is important to society, and not just other news outlets. Otherwise, scooping news or breaking it first has more to do with professional egotism than anything else.

 Steve:

Traditional journalism provides summarized accounts of news events. Liveblogs provide detailed extended accounts... I’m not saying that every aspect of digital journalism is an improvement. I think we have a lot to improve still. But I have more confidence than you [do] in journalism and in the public to continue improving.

2012: Let's get it right

News outlets generally take this time to reflect on the best and worst of the past year, and offer predictions for the years to come. I don't have a top or bottom ten list, and I'm not going to pretend I know what tomorrow will bring. For all I know the internet could disappear and be replaced with a virtual reality implantation device connected directly to our brains, so all we have to do is think "google" and our next thought triggers a nanosecond search on the subject.

I'm not a Luddite nor am I a technophile. There are useful inventions being created every day, but history spins in cycles that appear different only because the context has changed. As wonderful as the open source and free content movement is, it does not change the fundamental problems that prevent society from moving forward and beyond the real divisions that keep barbarism and ignorance thriving. By focusing so much on how wonderful the new tools and technologies are, are we missing the deeper meaning of it all?