I continue to be troubled by the Courant’s explanation of how it managed to use material from other newspapers — in some cases without attribution, or taking credit for the work – over a period of weeks.
I can see it happening once by mistake through a sloppy or hurried cut and paste, but for it to happen repeatedly?
And what about the idea of using the reporting from other papers with attribution? Is that just “research?” Is there some sort of continuum? At what point does the repeated use of another newspaper’s reporting cease to be “aggregation” and start to be theft?
Below is a little taste of what Steve Buttry, writing for the American Press Institute, had to say about some of these issues back in 2006. I’ve underlined the sentence that I find the most compelling. You can read the entirety of Buttry’s piece here.
But what if your story includes a couple paragraphs that are identical or nearly identical to passages in the story from the other newspaper? What if you didn’t talk to the same source as the other reporter, but just lifted quotes verbatim from that story, with credit to the expert but not the newspaper? In either case, the theft has become substantial. That makes it plagiarism regardless of intent.
Intent matters, but I don’t think it defines plagiarism. For one thing, intent is harder to gauge than result. And for another, nearly every journalist accused of an ethical breach blames it initially on sloppiness or carelessness. Many journalists have lost their jobs for failure to attribute, whatever you call it.
I don’t think you can steal whole quotes or whole passages from another story inadvertently. That is far less believable than that you would steal the quotes or passages and then lie about your intent when you’re caught. If you steal substantially, your editors and colleagues will presume that you did it deliberately.
And then there’s the question of holding journalists accountable. Throughout my long career in newspapers, I believed that plagiarism (or making stuff up) was a career-ending offense. Apparently that’s not the case at the Courant anymore.
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Excellent article on plagiarism. I’m going to use it in my UConn class this fall (and will credit you and Steve!)
Excellent points, Paul. And a thoughtful piece for all to ponder. This is the gist of my own blog today. (denishorgan.com.)
I can see where the Drudge Report or Huffington Post can “share” for their own readers the works of distant others on their webs. But how is it right for one paper to simply swipe the work of a direct competitor, even with attribution? Attribution? It is as if a burglar expected to skate by announcing “I stole this from the Smith’s house.”)By doing no work whatever, the Courant is lifting the stories of its competitors, reducing the need for the reader to follow the JI or Press or Post or whatever. That is exactly the goal, of course, but it’s a rotten goal. Surely the other papers could apply the same slippery ethics and simply publish on their own everything they want from the Courant. Would the Courant be OK with that? I hope not.
And wouldn’t this lead exactly to a diluting of the separate voices of the various newspapers when they all are printing the same thing?: exactly the offense imagined and then mysteriously abandoned when the attorney general briefly arched an eyebrow at the consolidation of voices between the Courant and Fox61.
This Napstering of someone else’s efforts, even with attribution, is simply unethical. It puts the JI etc. in the position of adding to the strength of its competitor — and having to pay for the news team necessary to do so while the skinny’d up Courant does no more work than pickpocketing the JI’s results.
The Courant is on a dreadful downhill ethical slope and its leadership which embraces that really needs to be changed. Imagine if some subsection of the sign department of the DOT was caught stealing someone else’s paint or worse. The Courant would call for heads to roll! Rightly.
To make matters worse, the Courant often doesn’t always get around to editing the material it aggregates. Data aggregation requires scrubbing as well as scraping, but the Courant, presumably to save money for executive bonuses, appears to have dispensed with some of the scrubbing. At least they’re training the scrubbers (former editors, now working on an assembly line) to go directly to the collection point and do what they can to sweep through the raw aggregated material and repackage it. There’s only so much material (fragments of news scraped from the Web) that a limited crew can sort through and repackage in a night, however, so don’t expect things to improve. I wonder whether the aggregation could be done just as efficiently in New Delhi.