Friday, March 12, 2004

Linking Errors, Plagiarism and News Site Design Note: This item was updated several times between March 9 and 18, as noted below. On March 19, further developments got their own blog entry. John Zakarian, editorial page editor of The Hartford Courant, called it "Every Editor's Nightmare." His nightmare was about plagiarism in his pages; it began when a reader alerted the paper to errors in an op-ed column, then further inspection revealed that parts of the article resembled a New York Times piece from a year ago. The author of the offending op-ed? That was another kind of nightmare: Richard Judd, the president of the state's second-largest public college wrote the column; his job at Central Connecticut State University is now at risk over what he portayed as an accident, telling Zakarian he "mistakenly assumed notes I had made were my own." The article itself was not a major academic research project, just a short opinion piece, shorter than this discussion page. Its point, Judd said, was "to express my hope that recent efforts toward a negotiated settlement in Cyprus would lead to peace in this island nation." (Central has had faculty and student exchanges with Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus for a decade.) The "online journalism" connection: The story's Web incarnation illustrates some differences in the way a "repurposed" or "shovelware" newspaper website differs from a site more dedicated to using the Web's powers of linkage and backgrounding. For an out-of-town reader of the Courant's Web edition (CTnow.com), tracking the continuing story took some searching. The original flawed column from Feb. 26 remained online, and was left unchanged for a week after the March 3 correction. When Zakarian's March 9 column appeared, identifying the copied passages, there were no links between the items until an e-mail from this reader pointed out the lack of cross-referencing. "There usually are linkages between story and corrections," he replied, "but we were not as quick to link as we should have been on this one." (Note: Courant editors are exceptionally good about having their e-mail addresses online for people to write to, even if you didn't work there 25 years ago the way "this reader" did.) The links were installed promptly that afternoon, as shown above, but the routine story-page design of the CTnow site didn't give them much impact -- short headlines in an easy-to-miss generic sidebar box headed "Related," which is sandwiched between identically-colored boxes headed "Utilities" and "More Headlines." A little headline, "Every Editor's Nightmare," led to Zakarian's column, which ended with the sentence, "The Courant regrets publishing Judd's article." (For comparison, corrected stories in The New York Times on the Web carry the words "correction appended" at the top, after the author's byline, and the full correction is repeated verbatim at the bottom of the article, as well as on the Times correction page. That's much more visible. The paper's policies on what to correct are another topic entirely, with the Times recently throwing lawyers at a Web site that parodied a Times page to make a point about errors in opinion columns getting special treatment. Sympathetic bloggers are spreading copies of the "banned" parody like kudzu.) The Courant's March 10 and 11 follow-up stories in the Judd saga carried no links back to the original article, although a fine-print note at the end of each item says, "If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at ctnow.com/archives." With the contributing stories all online, why not to give readers more direct access to this chain of items, or to other documents outside the Courant? For example, Judd's own March 15 letter of apology is on the CCSU website. A link to the allegedly plagiarized Times story might be appropriate, too, although by now it has slipped into the paid-access Times archives and databases like LexisNexis. At CTnow, however, the following stories were all online, linkable and accessible through the site search (after a free registration) until their links began to expire, usually into the paid-access archive. The first expiration came on March 12, when the link to the Feb. 26 article (the one shown in the image above) ceased to work. Feb. 26, Judd op-ed article: "A Good Peace is Within Reach for Cyprus" (After March 12, this link retrieved a page indicating that stories remain on the CTNow site for about two weeks, and that older items can be retrieved from the paper's paid archives. However, Judd's column did not appear in the archives. See italic note below.) March 3, Correction: (Refers to errors on Turkish history and a European Union membership date.) March 9, Zakarian note: "Plagiarism is every editor's nightmare... there is a basic understanding that stealing someone else's writing and passing it on as one's own is reprehensible..." March 10, "CCSU Leader in New Controversy": News story on college officials' reaction. March 11, "CCSU President Could Be Fired": More reactions, while the college awaits Judd's return from a trip to the Middle East. March 12, "CCSU Chief Returns to Storm of Questions": (The "Related" box now carries fresh sidebars, one on other plagiarism cases involving college presidents, the other showing side-by-side comparisons of seven short excerpts from Judd's article and its sources. However, a reader finding those sidebars by searching the site or archives doesn't get a "Related" box linking to the main stories. The link to Judd's original op-ed article is gone.) March 16, "Judd Gets Faculty Senate Support": A 36-5 vote of confidence supports the university president after he apologizes to a faculty meeting for failing to properly identify sources. Unlike the March 12 story, on the day of publication this one had no "Related" links to past stories to provide context. March 17, "Central President's Leadership Slipping": Columnist Stan Simpson, a Central grad who also wrote about Judd last week, is the first person I've seen point out that 20 years ago another Connecticut State University president lost his job in a plagiarism case, that time at Southern Connecticut. That wasn't long after the old "state teachers college" system added the word "university" to its four campuses' names, a few years after I left the Courant's education beat. It's a shame the online archives don't go back that far, even at $2+ per story. (See below.) March 18, "Report: Judd Plagiarized Work": Campus president is hospitalized after fainting in his office on the day his university system released a report calling his newspaper column an unacceptable act of plagiarism, even if unintentional. CTnow does not link to the report or earlier stories. Archiving the News: Other than the Feb. 26 Judd op-ed article, the items listed above and several others (including letters to the editor and a satirical "Lifestyle" column), could still be retrieved on March 16 by a CTNow site search for free or by a search of the Courant Newsbank archives, a pay-per-story service. A Courant editor responded to my inquiry about Newsbank or LexisNexis archival copies of Judd's op-ed piece with this note: Richard Judd is a contributor to The Hartford Courant who has not signed an agreement that gives us the rights to distribute his work to the database vendors, according to the head of The Courant's Center for News Research and Archives. I doubt there is an authorized on-line version available anywhere at this time. (This blog item was begun Mar. 9, retitled and updated Mar. 12, 16, 17 and 18.  See March 19, further developments.) 2:45:29 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2008 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/19/08; 12:54:45 PM.