By
Jonathan Bailey
Recently, The Star in Toronto published
a note from the paper’s public editor, Kathy English,
drawing attention to a case of plagiarism committed by one of the paper’s
interns. However, what made the case unusual was that the intern was
not accused of lifting content from another paper, but rather, from an earlier
article at The Star.
The incident was the result of a
September 30th, 2013 article, written by an intern, Marc
Ellison, on the subject of personalized licence plates that are forbidden by
the government. That article, according to the public editor, borrowed six
paragraphs from a 2010 article written by staff writer Daniel Dale on the same
topic.
Ellison, for his part, has admitted to
the plagiarism, calling it “frankly inexcusable” and blames it on trying to do
too much in the time he had. Though no other problems were found in Ellison’s
work, he no longer works at the paper.
Ellison instead took to his personal
blog, where he wrote about the incident, calling it “Professional harikiri." (sic)
There, he said he knew that the content reuse was not up to his standards and
was “not right”. He also added that he had never plagiarized before.
But despite the reaction to the
incident, borrowing content from earlier reports at a newspaper isn’t uncommon.
Many papers reuse sentences, paragraphs or passages from earlier reports in
newer ones, often without attribution.
The reason for this is that, many
times, there is only one appropriate way to say something in a newspaper,
whether it is for legal reasons or clarity. Also, it’s sometimes easier to just
copy and paste a relevant passage, especially of background information, than
to try and rewrite it dozens of times.
However, in the case of Ellison, the
copying went well beyond the boundaries of what most newspapers would find
acceptable. Not only is six paragraphs a very large sampling to copy and paste,
but the nature of the content wasn’t background information, but rather,
creative feature writing.
But while Ellison’s case is seemingly
non-controversial, with even Ellison himself admitting that it was
inappropriate, it raises some serious questions for journalists. When and how
is it acceptable to incorporate earlier work by the paper in new ones? When
should previous authors be attributed? What about wire services and external
sources?
The truth is that there is a wide
swatch of gray area between copying a sentence or two for legal reasons and
lifting six creative paragraphs as a shortcut, but somewhere in that space sits
a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Where that line sits is a question every publication
must wrestle with.
Fortunately, one issue newspapers don’t
have to wrangle with when it comes to self plagiarism is copyright. Since the
publication is the copyright holder in both the original and the new work,
there isn’t much legal risk involved. However, the ethical risk of recycling
content remains and that is why The Star responded as strongly as it did.
All in all, journalism has a tough
question to mull over and it’s one that is only going to grow in importance.
Reusing content is going to become more common as publications are faced with
shrinking news rooms and tighter deadlines, that’s going to make setting
boundaries and enforcing those boundaries more important than ever.
Via Craig Silverman's "Media Errors, Accuracy & Corrections"
Notebook on Spundge.
This post first appeared on the
Plagiarism Detection and Prevention Blog of the iThenticate
Plagiarism Detection Software website. The post is republished on
IJNet with iThenticate's permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment