For now, what’s striking to me about this whole affair is how me and a litany of other media folks instantly viewed this situation it in the same way. There is little, or no, dissention when it comes to the question of Romenesko’s intent and practices. (Peters touched on this in his post from today.)
At one point yesterday, Reuters’s Jack Shafer sent out a series of tweets noting that a large number of media critics—basically all of the well known ones in the US—had no complaints about Romenesko’s work when it came to attribution and linking. I was included on that list because I tweeted that Romenesko “has linked to me many times over the past seven years, and I never had an issue w/ attribution.” That’s been my personal experience. (Read all six Shafer tweets: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.)
So are all these media beat writers right, or are we gravitating towards the same point of view for other reasons? Dan Sinker called the whole thing “inside-baseball bullshittery”, and he’s right in the sense that this is so inside that it’s worth examining whether media people can be fair about it.
Look at all of the necessary disclosures at the top of this column, and it’s valid to wonder if I’m able to think about this clearly. Aside from my own situation, I can’t remember a time when I saw such a large group of grizzled media writers and critics line up on the same side.
The personal aspect is relevant here. As of now it seems that no press or media writer had an experience with Romenesko that led them to think he’d unfairly used their words. That’s important.
Personally, it was a strange experience to realize how I instantly didn’t assume any conscious wrongdoing on the part of Romenesko. This is not how I usually react to a situation like this. Usually, when a publication speaks of a failure of attribution, I’m pretty skeptical, if not downright incredulous.
I spoke to a journalism class in Chicago via Skype a few weeks back, and a student asked me about whether I thought people claiming to have committed accidental plagiarism were sincere. I said something to the effect that about 90 or 95 percent of claims of failure of attribution or accidental plagiarism are probably bullshit.
But yesterday? I almost without hesitation placed Romenesko in the 5 percent as soon as I read the story by Moos. I didn’t for a second think he had deliberately tried to make other people’s words seem like his own. As I watched my Twitter feed explode about the story by Moos, I saw a great many media critics and journalists felt the same way.
What needs to be recognized is that so many of us on the media beat have a long relationship with Romenesko, even though I doubt more than a couple of us have ever met him. (I recall during one recent conversation with Moos that I referred to Romenesko as “the unicorn of journalism,” the mythical beast of aggregation no one ever sees.)
Media critics and news junkies have been reading him for more than a decade. We admire the herculean work he does to get up early, post often, and tease out the most interesting details from a huge amount of reporting and commentary. We like his work and we respect him. We feel a connection. We trust him.
The fact that he almost never gives interviews, doesn’t show up on panels at conferences, and seems genuinely uninterested in glory or feeding his own ego is incredibly rare in this business.
What else? Oh right: he has the ability to send a shitload of traffic your way. That’s currency, power.
So, yes, we also want to be on his good side. We’ve benefitted from him over the years. I admit without hesitation that him linking to my site, even just a few times a year, has helped it establish credibility in the worlds of media criticism and journalism.
This tweet from New York Observer writer Kat Stoeffel summed up Romensko’s power and the unanimity of the response thus far:
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