2008 Woodie Awards
Journalistic malpractice
Rampant plagiarism is plaguing profession
Matt Williams
Issue date: 4/26/07 Section: Soap Box
Is journalism - newspaper writing in particular - going to the dogs, or what?
Never mind dwindling circulation leading to an even smaller job market and forget about the advent of the inter-Web keeping those darned kids from buying the newspaper. The recent rash of blatant plagiarism is of infinitely more concern than any economic issue.
Last week, the issue hit home in the University of Maine area as an 18-year Bangor Daily News vet, Sharon Mack, was hit with a five-day suspension for what the paper called, among other things, an "apparent case of plagiarism."
Then there was Ron Borges, the surly and reviled Boston Globe football scribe who cut-and-pasted a section of his notes column from a national writers' database without attribution.
I fear there are other such cases around the country, but those are the two that stand out most recently. How ironic is it that Stephen Glass - the hotshot reporter who completely fabricated dozens of stories at The New Republic - is used as an example for not pushing young writers too quickly, while the most egregious plagiarizers have decades of experience under their belts?
This isn't an indictment of Mack or Borges as much as it is a wake-up call for every aspiring reporter on this campus. Neither scribe plagiarized with malice, but they still did it and paid a dear price in their reputations. Last week's BDN story on Mack left me with the impression that she'd mistakenly left notes from the Christian Science Monitor in the midst of her story; it sounds like an honest mistake. Borges thought he was just taking material from a wire and got lazy when he didn't rewrite it. How many reporters and editors have done that with the AP wire without detection? While Borges' notes subscription isn't on the level of the AP wire, the question merits some thought.
In both cases - and in Glass' case as well -- the offenses were noticed by a surfer on that pesky inter-Web. Such is life in the information age: People from all over America can read anything with the click of a mouse and if they happen to have read something that looks awfully familiar days earlier, look out. It's a wonderful thing to have such a wide audience, but it carries a greater responsibility as well. It really is a privilege to write in these pages - treat it as such.
Never mind dwindling circulation leading to an even smaller job market and forget about the advent of the inter-Web keeping those darned kids from buying the newspaper. The recent rash of blatant plagiarism is of infinitely more concern than any economic issue.
Last week, the issue hit home in the University of Maine area as an 18-year Bangor Daily News vet, Sharon Mack, was hit with a five-day suspension for what the paper called, among other things, an "apparent case of plagiarism."
Then there was Ron Borges, the surly and reviled Boston Globe football scribe who cut-and-pasted a section of his notes column from a national writers' database without attribution.
I fear there are other such cases around the country, but those are the two that stand out most recently. How ironic is it that Stephen Glass - the hotshot reporter who completely fabricated dozens of stories at The New Republic - is used as an example for not pushing young writers too quickly, while the most egregious plagiarizers have decades of experience under their belts?
This isn't an indictment of Mack or Borges as much as it is a wake-up call for every aspiring reporter on this campus. Neither scribe plagiarized with malice, but they still did it and paid a dear price in their reputations. Last week's BDN story on Mack left me with the impression that she'd mistakenly left notes from the Christian Science Monitor in the midst of her story; it sounds like an honest mistake. Borges thought he was just taking material from a wire and got lazy when he didn't rewrite it. How many reporters and editors have done that with the AP wire without detection? While Borges' notes subscription isn't on the level of the AP wire, the question merits some thought.
In both cases - and in Glass' case as well -- the offenses were noticed by a surfer on that pesky inter-Web. Such is life in the information age: People from all over America can read anything with the click of a mouse and if they happen to have read something that looks awfully familiar days earlier, look out. It's a wonderful thing to have such a wide audience, but it carries a greater responsibility as well. It really is a privilege to write in these pages - treat it as such.
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Mark McCrohon
posted 4/27/07 @ 8:14 AM EST
Journalists and editors might like to consider my plagiarism detection tool which is on the web at www.doccop.com DOC Cop allows journalists and editors to check articles against the internet for instances of plagiarism or poor attribution before publication. (Continued…)
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