Earlier today, I was interviewed about "writing for the Web" and I forgot to mention something important... I said all my usual things about the value of basic newswriting skills, effective headlines and summaries -- but left out this obvious point:
Writing for the Web can and should use the Web
Web linkage can add dimension to a story, offering details, references and attribution that some readers may find essential -- and that most can ignore by simply not clicking those links.  Case in point -- using Web links might have saved a distinguished Missouri journalism professor the sight of the nightmare headline on the right, after a 60 year career that includes literally writing the book on journalism ethics -- more than one, actually.
I think it's a bad headline based on a bum rap. He didn't deserve it. The word "plagiarism" implies much worse offense than this case, which may be routine practice for many newspaper columnists: He quoted people. He identified the people he quoted. He just didn't identify a publication where he read those quotes. All that's missing from his column is a link to the earlier story.
Note: Professor John Merrill admits that leaving out that attribution was careless. I think that for many columnists -- over the years -- it has been common practice... a practice that should be reconsidered now that "citing" a source online is so easy that it won't harm the most poetic columnist's prose.
In this case, an emeritus journalism professor writing a quick newspaper column to bemoan the latest academic trend probably did not get on the phone and chat up folks from the women's studies program. A suspicious editor could have done a quick Web search and inserted the links after confirming them with the author.
Ironic aside: In my interview this morning, I hope I talked about both "brevity" and "choice" as important in online writing. Most readers may want to exercise that choice and stop here. But I'll keep going for the minority who are more interested in the "plagiarism" case than my point about linking things... Some definitions may help:- Reporters go out and interview people, then write stories.
- Columnists
write opinions. Some columnists don't get out much. Some of them make
stuff up so much that they add "I'm not making this up" here and there.
- Plagiarism is taking someone else's writing and presenting it as your own.
- Poaching is borrowing someone else's reporting
and presenting it as -- just possibly -- your own. When reporters do
it, they're being dumb, lazy or egotistical. When columnists do it,
it's probably just columny.
(I've never seen that lightweight definition of "poaching." I made it up just this
minute. Here's a heavy duty version. By both definitions -- a story idea or a lifted quote -- I probably did some poaching when I was younger, for which
I'm ashamed.)
Merrill was wearing a
"columnist" hat when he took on the new women's studies department at
the university, bemoaning the fragmentation of universities and the
trendiness of giving so many specialties department status, including
journalism schools' additions of "strategic communication" or
"convergence."
Quotes in news reports: If I see someone quoted in a news story, I assume the reporter talked to the person or read something written by the person -- or at least written by a ghost-writer or public relations practitioner paid to put words in the person's mouth. (We encourage journalism students to "get their own quotes," not to settle for canned quotes supplied in press releases. But deadlines, laziness and lack of options do lead some of those packaged quotes into print.) Quotes in opinion columns: I assume columnists are paid to give opinions or analysis, to inform me or amuse me. A quote may be second or third-hand... or completely made up, depending on the style of that particular columnist.
Columnists have "poached" on reporters and on each other for more than a century. One of my favorites, "Mr. Dooley" (F.P. Dunne), often began a tale with "I see be th' paypurs..." He even made up stories that he appeared to be poaching from! Terrible! But I bet no one was fooled. Reading his columns, even today, you know characters and conversations are probably fictional, but there's a serious point in the background. That was his style, a precursor of truthiness. If a modern newspaper op-ed columnist puts something in quote marks, I assume the quote is real, but not that the columnist switched to a reporter's hat and interviewed someone. When in doubt, I paste the quote into the search field of that newspaper's Web site to look for find the original quote in context. For example, Paul Krugman's latest op-ed column includes this paragraph, with an embedded quote at the end:
... Social Security to nothing but a giant 401(k). The administration claimed that this was necessary to save the program, which officials insisted was "heading toward an iceberg." The iceberg quote isn't linked to anything in the Times, but it's clearly referring to something Krugman considers a fact -- a widely publicized Bush administration propaganda strategy memo. Those two links took me all of two minutes to find with the Times and Google. Back in Missouri, I didn't assume Merrill was "reporting," or that he made his own phone calls to the women's studies folks, even if he did neglect to say "told the student newspaper" instead of "said..." If his editor had simply inserted a Web link on each quote, the story might look like this: The director of undergraduate advising for the new department, Jessica Jennrich, said that they can "now offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility." or this... The director of undergraduate advising for the new department, Jessica Jennrich, said that they can "now offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility." (OK, maybe blue underlining is ugly... I don't mind it myself, but a little bit of Web page coding could make it more subtle, just for links that are subtle bits of background.)
Merrill shows trust in the original reporter, since his second-hand use of each quote assumes the original was accurate enough to be treated as a "news fact" in its own right. That's his only carelessnes. Back when I was a reporter, I didn't trust many other reporters to have their quotes right in the first place. It was an ego/competition thing.
Over the years, John Merrill and his books -- on media ethics, among other topics -- have inspired many future reporters. Some of them are back with comments appended to his later column; see Carelessness is not plagiarism.
I'm sure I've been more careless many times, particularly when I was compiling a "People in the News" column for The Hartford Courant. In fact, so little of that column was based on my own interviews that I had to point out when I DID talk to someone -- even if it was to make an apology for my own carelessness.
Note: It's not exactly poaching, but I'm restoring a note from the first draft of this essay to mention that I heard of the Merrill case from Jim Romenesko at Poynter and Mindy McAdams. I also like Adrian Monck's comments on the case.
Ridiculously Full Disclosure: Unlike a lot of the people rushing to his defense, I've never met Merrill, but I did some editorial computer wizardry for one of his ethics textbook co-authors when I was a grad student, so I do get mentioned in their book's preface.
Afterword: I've done some editing since the first draft of this,
and added the image Nov. 18. If I do a major rewrite,
I'll post or publish the revised version elsewhere and link it here.
5:10:15 PM 
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