Jayson Blair: Sometimes plagiarists aren’t this obvious

In a world where RSS feed aggregation is the norm, and the Drudge Report is as big an online presence as the New York Times, Jody Rosen’s “Dude, You Stole My Article” piece on Slate.com, which chronicled Rosen’s investigation into a small (and now defunct) Texas alternative weekly named the Bulletin, hit a nerve for both the casual reader and any journalist who has slaved into the wee hours writing an original work.

An innocuous reader tip about Rosen’s Jimmy Buffett story possibly being ripped-off by a writer named Mark Williams, turned into the unmasking of what Rosen called, “the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism.” The publisher and writer essentially made blatant plagiarism the entire business model for their publication. Collectively, it’s a massive violation of fair-use and copyright laws, with a level of wanton disregard anyone can appreciate, but one that sucker punches journalists in the gut.

The most intriguing point that Rosen raises in his article deals with the infinitely more nebulous area of rss feed aggregation and content linking on the internet:

But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend—or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerrilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.

Where does aggregation end and plagiarism begin? We put the question to Bill Boyarsky, former City Editor of the Los Angeles Times and current columnist for Truth Dig, and Choire Sicha, former Editor at Gawker, New York Observer columnist, and freelancer for Radar Online.

The forms of communication that both picked to conduct the interview indicated their chosen mediums. Boyarsky, an old-school print guy-turned-web journalist, insisted on a phone interview while, Sicha, one of the best known media bloggers responded to my questions via email. While they agreed on some points, their perspectives were often a study in contrasts.

“What [Rosen] wrote about is out and out plagiarism,” said Boyarksy.  But when asked about the parallel with news aggregation, Boyarksy conceded that “there are objections to news aggregation.”

“It’s not plagiarism,” he said. “Everything on the Huffington Post is linked and attributed…when I read that paragraph, I thought [Rosen] was talking apples to oranges.”

As someone who has spent vast amounts of time working in cyberspace Sicha is more skeptical toward what he dubs, “the fight currently ongoing between major newspapers and the AP, over what the businessmen like to call ‘repackaging content’ and what other people call ’stealing.’”

“I subscribe to [New York Observer reporter] Tom Scocca’s definition of plagiarism,” says Sicha. “And that is, in short form: What does this guy have that that guy didn’t have already? (See how I didn’t plagiarize there, by giving Tom his due credit?).”

News aggregation is, by definition, properly credited. The Huffington Post, for example, is a paying customer of the Associated Press, just like any print publication that utilizes AP wire feeds for content. Boyarksy was quick to point out that sites like HuffPo and Real Clear Politics have editors whose sole purpose is to select the best version of a story reported by multiple outlets.

In this manner, aggregation is a service unto itself. “There’s no way I could wake up every morning and find all of that myself, that quickly,” Boyarksy said.

So if the Bulletin’s editors and writers had merely attributed the source for each lifted quote in the stories, would they have actually had a legitimate defense?

Mark Williams’ “work” was a collection of loosely rephrased graphs lifted from many different sources; rather than the form of plagiarism we are more used to: paragraphs or sentences used whole hog without attribution.

What Williams did is closer to what thousands of bloggers do everyday—take a story, and rephrase the sentence, including the basic facts, without necessarily adding their own spin or opinion. Often, they don’t attribute their sources.

Such practices touched a nerve with Sicha, who responded to our request for comment, thus: “Well I don’t have too much to say on the subject,” and then wrote a 400-word response that lambasted the lapse into into laziness.

“You see plagiarism of ideas without credit all the time in Internetland—on a daily basis,” wrote Sicha. “It’s an easy thing to commit, too, particularly when you’re writing a blog, and you’re tasked with producing a certain amount of what they call ‘content.’”

To get readers to refresh the page like crack addicts, the Gawkers and Defamers of our day rely on volume almost as much as they do their trademark brand of snark. It’s a model quickly becoming the norm, where a “journalist” is paid $15 per post, whether it’s 20 words or 200.

“Right now, what I see a lot of is people linking less and less prominently to their source material…sometimes it’s just tiredness and distractedness, Lord knows I know–but it’s bad for the Internet and it’s bad for all of us,” he said before posing the question: “Why can’t we have an Internet where stories and sources are linked and even named prominently?”

Boyarsky sees linking as a new way to add context and background information to his columns at TruthDig, which reflect the traditional style of journalism he practices. The only difference is the medium.

“I link to things in my column that I get from all over,” he said. “The Washington Post, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.” Boyarsky prefers that people check out the source material without a verbose summary.

“I don’t think linking is plagiarism at all,” Boyarsky said.  “Not at all.”  Of course, this is prefaced by a mention of fair-use law.

Says Sicha: “There’s a huge, and obvious, difference between fair use—blockquoting some text and giving a link and a name credit—and unethical reprinting.”

A court applies four basic tenets of fair-use law to determine if there’s a violation. What is the purpose and character of the use?—does the reproduction transform the original work? Is it used for commentary purposes? And does it serve a purpose other than filling dead space? Another guideline is the nature of the original work—is it even able to be copyrighted?  (The answer is “yes” for anything published, online or in print.)

The court also weighs in on a piece’s effect on the market. Does the reproduction hinder the original owner’s ability to make money from their copyrighted work?

I’m sure the newspaper industry would have a few things to say about that.

The fourth standard is perhaps the least subjective and the most important in this application: the amount of the use, both in proportion to the original piece and in context of the new article or blog post. The court considers both the percentage of the original work being used, but also how much of the new piece the borrowed material constitutes. For example, taking 300 words of a 30,000 word speech is insignificant, but not if those 300 words are used in a 400 word blog post.

No matter how you slice it, the case of the Bulletin qualifies as violation. Although journalists attempt to draw lines in the sand between print and online, despite the tongue-in-cheek tone, Rosen’s parallel is legit.

The onus is still squarely on bloggers and the smaller outfits to establish guidelines. The content explosion that has occurred over the past few years has everything to do with the internet and with such a vast amount of competition out there cranking out 30 posts a day, it’s tough not to cut corners.

As much as bloggers get called out for not attributing material or stealing sources, Sicha points out this is and age-old journalistic complaint: “Of course, it’s not just blogs,” he says. “This is common practice in newspapers from not only a hundred years ago.” Heck, newspapers fight it out between each other over “stolen” stories all the time.”

As I’m sure Jody Rosen and countless numbers of working professionals would contend, just because you can put something out there with a staff of two and a few clicks of a button, it doesn’t excuse sloppyness and laziness as regular business conduct. Says Sicha: “What site lead or managing editor of a website has time to send out a memo saying THIS is how we attribute stories and THIS is the theory behind it and it’s A GOOD THING? Few, if any.”

To anyone who has slaved over a piece into the wee hours of the night, deadline looming, only to pull it off and see something published that’s not only drenched with your own blood, sweat, and tears, but is something you are proud of, you feel this pain when someone swipes your stuff. It doesn’t matter if you banged it out in the New York Times office building or on your Macbook in a 600 sq. ft, fourth floor walk-up in the East Village, it’s the work that counts. It only takes all of 10 seconds for someone to ctrl-c all of your hard work and ctrl-v their name right on it.

Says Sicha: “Pretty much, as things stand now, everyone feels bad in one way or another, and everyone actually does have a reason to feel bad.”

Image credit:  http://andresserrano.org

Tags: bill boyarsky, choire sicha, gawker, jody rosen, news aggregation, plagiarism, radar, slate, truth dig