I have no other option than to start this column about Jim Romenesko with a litany of disclosures. Deep breath, here we go:
Romenesko has linked to my blog, Regret the Error, many times since it launched in 2004. My guess is he’s probably linked to me three to five times a year, maybe a bit more. (I’ve always tried to be judicious in the number of links I sent to him. I can only imagine what his inbox looks like.)
I’ve long been a fan of his blog. In fact it helped provide a measure of inspiration for me to want to launch my own media-focused blog. That said, he and I have never exchanged anything more than a few words by e-mail.
Also: I recently visited Poynter, the home of his blog for the past twelve years, to talk with them about how we can work together. Nothing has been formally agreed to but I expect there to be something to share publicly very soon. No, I’m not trying to be the next Romenesko.
I list all of the above because, of course, I’m writing about the events that led up to Romenesko’s resignation from Poynter yesterday. It began when Julie Moos, one of the people I’ve been speaking with at Poynter, put up a post explaining that, “Jim Romenesko’s posts exhibit a pattern of incomplete attribution.”
She learned this thanks to “the sharp eye of Erika Fry, an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review.”
I am, of course, a columnist for CJR and have been for more than three years. I’ve never met or worked with Erika Fry. I have no knowledge about what she has been working on regarding Romenesko other than what was mentioned by Moos, on the CJR Twitter feed, and in this recent post by Justin Peters, who edits this column.
I think that covers most of the necessary disclosures, but in a sense this entire column is a disclosure.
So, the basic questions: Was it plagiarism? Or is what Romenesko did wrong?
Moos herself says Romenesko is not a plagiarist. She told 10,000 Words that, “I don’t characterize it as plagiarism, which usually involves an intent to deceive.”
I agree: Romenesko is scrupulous about always telling you where the information came from. Plagiarism involves an element of passing off another’s work as your own and not offering any credit. A plagiarist doesn’t want people to know where it came from. Romenesko is big on credit. He cites journalists’ names and their publications. He links back. It is at the very essence of what he does. He finds the good stuff and tells you how to get more if you want it.
Was it a mistake on his part to not put quotation marks around verbatim passages? Of course it was. That’s basic journalistic practice, and it matters how frequently this occurred.
Reuters’ Felix Salmon argues passionately that Romenesko did not need to put quotation marks around these passages, and that “If he’s violating the guidelines, then it’s the guidelines which are at fault, not Romenesko.”
My personal view is that just because you’re aggregating and curating it doesn’t excuse you from offering attribution in the form of quotes. I’m currently the editorial director of a Canadian online news organization that employs seven people we call “news curators.” Their job is to curate the best local news in their respective cities. Having them put verbatim passages in quotes is standard practice, and it serves everyone’s interests. Readers expect quotes and verbatim words to be in, well, quotes. So too do other news organizations. Those expectations inform how people consume our work.
Like everyone else, I’ll have to wait for the CJR piece to find out more specifics about this specific instance. Yesterday’s piece by Moos does not provide a list of examples, so I have no idea how often Romenesko mixed the words of others with his own. And, yes, I believe it’s important to know. We should have the full facts on the table.
Now this post I dig, an Onion like satirical piece on L'Affaire Romenesko.
But, just in case I have i wrong and this is not not satire, two thoughts:
The Great and Powerful Romenesko. F'real? Meaning no offense to a hard-working gut, but months pass without my even thinking of him, and weeks pass without my looking at his site. As I stated before, it's a handsome shtetl bulletin board for the shtetl I work in.
That's it.
And then Mr. Silverman cuts to the critical quick. It turns out that I might be defending Romenseko because I'm ... I'm ... a man.
Because men are more likely to aggregate? Men are more likely to procrastinate looking at computer bulletin boards detailing the latest six of their friends in journalism who were laid off? Men are more likely to defend guys named Romenesko?
The fact that I can't puzzle this one out only points of course to my need to put in a semester at the Re-Education Camp
#1 Posted by Michael Powell, CJR on Fri 11 Nov 2011 at 02:34 PM
Silverman's piece is more mental masturbation signifying nothing. In a long line of ridiculous journalism "scandals," this one wins the booby prize. We have so much gutlessness, laziness, incompetence, and stupidity in the media, and Moos and Fry are wasting precious time complaining about something that thousands of journalists have read for 15 years and never seen a problem with? How about spending the time instead reporting some stories that make a difference in the world? Pshew.
#2 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Fri 11 Nov 2011 at 03:06 PM
What crap. Nobody is weighing in on what Erika Fry has done. They are reacting to the unfairness of Julie Moos's post at Poynter. Now here comes CJR circling the wagons before you even post Fry's article, claiming anyone who thinks Romenesko isn't a cheating hack and has been treated unfairly likewise is an unethical journalist interested only in a quid-pro-quo.
And for what it's worth, attribution takes many forms. "This is stupid," says Brian O'Connor isn't any purer than, Brian O'Connor says this is stupid.
Plus, you know, all those years ago when I was an arts editor? I hardly ever attributed the calendar listings to the sponsoring organizations. And yet, somehow, the readers know that the move theater had provided the movie times, not my own pain-staking investigative research. I now see I should have written: "The Muppet Movie begins at 9:15 p.m., according to Nancy Merriweather, 19, assistant general manager of Deefield 12 Cineplex, Deerfield Beach." Alas, I clearly claimed another's work as my own. Thank you for enlightening me, Julie Moos and CJR.
I've had extremely few dealings with Jim over the years, and I can't benefit in any way from traffic he might or might not send my way. I'm not angry about this because he's bought me off (or threatened me) with links. I'm angry because this entire outrageous thing has been unfair and unprofessional to Jim and offensive and insulting to his readers.
#3 Posted by Brian O'Connor, CJR on Fri 11 Nov 2011 at 03:41 PM
Poynter asked for feedback after its recent make-over. I replied saying I thought slathering Romenesko's name before and after every single entry was excessive.
To me, splattering one's name among links to other people's work and opinions is both misleading and ego-tripping. While punctuation marks are good, I don't believe the present uproar about quote marks would be as significant if there had not been the incessant stream of me-me-me branding.
Dan Froomkin's popular column was a most admirable model for an aggregation blog until the Washington Post ended it-- in a disservice to its readers. Froomkin included contextual links and (blessedly) brief but insightful comments in his White House Briefing column.
Both Romenesko and Froomkin obviously arose before dawn each morning to offer topical links to their earliest (east coast) readers. For years, the fastest way to reach Romenesko's column was to type 'media gossip' into a search engine. The difference between the two columns was that Froomkin most often included his own original reporting and commentary. That was journalism. He did not brand his name on every three sentences in the way PR flaks might to promote branding.
#4 Posted by Bonnie Britt, CJR on Fri 11 Nov 2011 at 07:45 PM
I am surprised that journalists would consider Romenesko to be running such an important service. I work on fine-tuning time zones and doing original reading of sites in at least Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK every day, to the point that I know where to look. I would never rely on someone else to do this international media cycle for me.
As a model for students suffering from a significant American pathology in education, crude handling of evidence and text, Jim is atrocious. Two cultures need to be changed: the amateur one in which American teachers throw novels at students without expecting them to master the language up to the level of the COBUILD English Grammar, and the habit of journalists of discounting language and cognition.
Every journalist should have to take a rigorous course in Mark Ashcraft's "Cognition" and in the COBUILD grammar. If we have little idea about the most fundamental contributions of linguistics and psychology, we are putting the mind-forged manacles on even before sitting down (or standing up) to get to work.
I am stunned--as if someone had let me have it brutally backhanded with a hardwood board crunch--that professional journalists cannot see how slovenly Jim's attribution habits are. Changing the two cultures would mean reading "The Jungle Book" carefully out loud, at least twice, with young students, concentrating on the reporting features on the second reading, and encouraging them to join the Scouts where they could do more work on Kipling.
After "The Jungle Book," then "Kim," and then the Rutherford Kipling's selected stories. Without such tenacious programs, you will end up defending the most slapdash rooting in and ripping of text. Erika has tried to present her points in a cautious and reasonable way. She should be respected for that.
#5 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 11 Nov 2011 at 11:36 PM
I think reasonable minds can disagree as to whether Romenesko's methods crossed the line. But what is most mystifying to me is that Moos was shocked, shocked to find this going on in her backyard. Either she is guilty of lax supervison of her underlings ("should have known") or she did know and was panicked by the impending revelations from the Columbia person. It's all rather like Reagan on Iran-Contra, she's damned in both instances. Worse, though, is her pathetic attempt to replace Romenesko with her own plodding pontifications. Seems to me we have a case of: if you can't hack it in journalism, you go into teaching it.
#6 Posted by jonesey, CJR on Thu 17 Nov 2011 at 02:32 PM
I will not weigh in on the substance of this post; but I must say that his poor grammar undermines the writer's credentials as a journalist, even as a blogger.
#7 Posted by Bob Roistacher, CJR on Thu 15 Dec 2011 at 09:06 PM