Last week, I examined why news organizations aren’t using plagiarism detection services to root out literary thieves. Technology has a role in helping prevent and detect plagiarism, but it’s by no means a panacea. Good habits and best practices can help avoid and detect plagiarism (and fabrication).
The challenge is that, to my knowledge, no one has written a definitive guide to avoiding or detecting journalistic plagiarism. As a starting point, here’s a range of advice and tips.
Tips for Writers
The two most recent instances of plagiarism both saw the reporters in question claim that they had unintentionally used the work of others. Whether or not you find this a plausible explanation, it’s the most common excuse offered by journalists caught plagiarizing. They rarely, if ever, cop to the offense. So the question becomes how can we help journalists avoid accidental copying? Here’s what I’ve been able to collect in terms of tips and best practices:
• “Before you start to research, write. In the middle of your research, write. Expressing your own thoughts and using your own words will force your brain to flex the self-expression neurons, rather than the repetition neurons.” (Via Poynter)
• Keep research separate from writing. Don’t copy-and-paste other people’s words and work into your draft until you’re ready to quote from it. Then…
• Use a different font and text color for your research files. This will help you instantly recognize other people’s words when you paste them into your story. (Many people have suggested this over the years. It works.)
• Add in the proper attribution as soon as you paste any research into your draft.
• Put quotes in “quotes.” Whether taking notes by hand, transcribing an interview, or copying text from another source, always use quotation marks. This helps prevent you from forgetting to add them later.
• Live to link. For those producing online content, link as much as possible. This reinforces the act of attribution. For print and broadcast people, stop the silly practice of not crediting competitors.
• If it seems clever, check it out. I thought Maureen Dowd had said a line like this, but I Googled it and couldn’t confirm. So let me state clearly that the first sentence of this bullet point may belong to someone else. The idea is straightforward: if you think you’ve come up with a clever or unique sentence or quip, check it out. It’s possible you heard or read it before and forgot. (Via ?)
• Review paraphrased material. The rewrite was/is an art in journalism. But if you get it wrong, you’re a thief. So always check your paraphrased sections against the originals. (Via eHow)
• Google it all. Plagiarists are often busted by someone plugging a few sentences or paragraphs into Google. Do the same for yourself. Google large sections of your piece just before submission in order to ensure you haven’t accidentally mislaid a few quotation marks. And use Factiva and/or Lexis-Nexis if you have access to them.
Tips for Editors
I can recommend no better advice than what was offered by John McIntyre, the former head of the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun, in 2008. The blog where he originally posted the information is no longer active on the Sun’s site, but McIntyre graciously republished the post on his own blog this week. (For those unsure of the rules of attribution, he also wrote this helpful column for my site.)
These are McIntyre’s best tips for spotting a plagiarist/fabulist:
• Changes in diction: If the vocabulary of an otherwise amateurish student writer or cliche-ridden hack journalist should abruptly grow sophisticated, lifting is likelier than an infusion from the muse.
• Changes in syntax: Same thing. If a writer who struggles to cobble together a noun and a verb suddenly masters the compound-complex sentence, with attendant Ciceronian participial ornaments, it’s time to start looking for the source.• Specialized information: Ask Howard Baker’s question from the Watergate hearings of beloved memory: What did he know, and when did he know it? Sudden access to biographical details, historical information, ecclesiastical terminology or scientific or medical expertise has to have come from somewhere. Insist on an explanation of the source.
• Dubious sources: Any article based on a single source is automatically suspect — how can you tell that the source wasn’t lying? Where’s the confirmation? Similarly, anything based on second- or third-hand sources demands scrutiny. In addition, readers are justifiably suspicious of anonymous sources. Even when anonymity has been granted for good reason, such as the source’s reasonable fear of physical or economic injury, the writer should be obliged to reveal the source to the assigning editor, acquire independent supporting information, and give the reader as much information as is prudent about the anonymous source’s credibility.
• Improbabilities: When Jack Kelley filed his famous story with USA Today about seeing, in the aftermath of a bombing, human heads rolling down the street, their eyelids still blinking, it would have been a good thing for the paper if an editor had said, “What the hell?” and followed up. In journalism, as in investment offers, if it looks too good to be true …
Here are a couple of other pieces of advice for editors:
• Beware of last minute, Hail Mary changes. If a reporter is struggling with a story and suddenly turns in something with top-notch quotes, solid research etc., you should be suspicious. How did things suddenly go so right?
• Open up the process. Encourage reporters to expand on an article by producing a blog post that lays out, and links to, their research, or that presents additional quotes from interviewees. “If everything we do is out there for the public to see, we’ll have an incentive to stay honest, and we might just earn back some of the trust that people seem to have lost in journalists over the past few decades,” wrote Michael Becker.
This is by no means a final guide; I hope reporters, editors and others will share their knowledge. Consider the above to be a starting point for discussion. What advice am I missing? How could these tips be improved? Share your thoughts in the comments or contact me directly.
Correction of the Week
“I am sorry to disappoint all the readers who wished to apply for the position, but New Orleans does not employ a ‘sex assessor.’ That was a misprint in Wednesday’s column. It should have read ‘tax assessor.’ Slips don’t come much more Freudian than that.” – Times-Picayune
Great piece, Craig. Most of my advice is covered here, but I offer these blog posts and workshop handouts I have written dealing with plagiarism and prevention:
http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/i-lifted-but-attributed-most-of-this-post-on-plagiarism/
http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/pages/resources/2006/09/when_does_sloppy_attribution_b/
http://www.notrain-nogain.org/Train/Res/Ethics/Eattrib.asp
http://www.notrain-nogain.org/Train/Res/Ethics/Echeat.asp
Posted by Steve Buttry on Fri 26 Feb 2010 at 11:25 AM
I think this is great to give some guidance, especially for journalists just starting out, on practices that can prevent problems. Making them a habit will help keep them out of trouble unless they are dedicated to deception.
In my career of more than two decades as a newspaper reporter, I came up with a range of techniques myself including:
+Using some kind of typographical notation for common-knowledge passages that need checking and paraphrasing before submission
+For information that in fairness to another journalist and in service to the reader needed attribution to another source, be sure to jot down all the needed info from the start. That makes citations easy to do, especially as deadline looms rather than another rushed last-minute, backtracking task.
One concern however came up when out of curiosity, I checked out the tips with the EHow link. The first one reads: "Determine if the information is common knowledge. If the information has been cited in five other sources, it's safe to assume that it's common knowledge and does not need citation."
I would disagree, and I worry for newer journalists or those just now getting religion if they follow this.
The five apparent distinct sources can actually just be one (say several publication, broadcast and online outlets under the same ownership repeating what a sister entity reported.)
Plus, for the sake of news consumers, even including a line about "In widespread news reports" can help prod them to think about the difference between what's been reported, what's common knowledge and what's been established as fact.
Posted by Maya Blackmun on Fri 26 Feb 2010 at 01:28 PM
Just love your own words. No one's ever mistaken the neighbor's kid for theirs.
Posted by A.Selk on Sat 27 Feb 2010 at 09:19 AM
Excellent job educating journalists. Thanks. See the Digital Media Pyramid at www.ojr.org which instructs journalists and students about cut-and-paste, copyrights and other digital practices. It's been taught by me at Rutgers for years -- and it works.
Posted by Benjamin Davis on Sat 27 Feb 2010 at 02:45 PM
Excellent job Craig.
There may be a number of other factors involved in the high number of plagiarism in the past five to ten years.
1. Deadline pressures. I know this sounds simple. But before the Internet, reporters had no blogs, website updates, online chats or tweets to worry about. They were required to research, report and write news stories, that's all. Once those stories are produced, they sat on the copy desk for hours being combed over by rim, slot and news editors before being published. These days, many reporters are required to write and publish in a matter of minutes.
2. Pressures to produce. News staffs have been cut to the bone. Years ago, reporters at metro dailies were required to produce two, maybe three, stories a week. I remember one reporter that had to produce one story every two months. Today, with smaller staffs, reporters are banging out thousands of words a week, many of which get published almost as they are being written (see above).
3. Finally, as easy as it is to cheat from online sources, it's just as easy to get caught.
-- Jeff
Posted by Jeff Pijanowski on Sat 27 Feb 2010 at 03:38 PM
I think points 1 and 2 cited by Jeff above are handy excuses for journalists who are going to cheat anyway. Journalists at smaller organizations have always faced the pressures to produce described in #2. And the honest ones don't cheat.
Posted by Steve Buttry on Sat 27 Feb 2010 at 10:16 PM
How hard is it for a writer to ask himself or herself "Did I write this sentence or did I not? Is this my idea or someone else's idea?" If you can't figure that out you have a problem from the get-go.
How hard is it to attribute? "As John Doe of "blahblahblah" said.....
Posted by Dan on Sun 28 Feb 2010 at 01:55 AM
While all the above is true, one also must understand that the reason large scale and systemic plagiarism is occurring is because it has become much easier to do. In a previous universe you knew something had been copied because you literally hand copied it. Not today. Cutting and pasting from other sources is today synonymous with research. Indeed in a computer age the process of writing itself seems quasi-plagiaristic. That is you no longer wrote and then rewrite and rewrite and in the process physically see where your thoughts started and where they ended. Rather, cutting and pasting has made the final product look seamless and whole. Consequently fitting someone else’s cut and pasted voice into that process feels less like intellectual theft and more like the act of literary composition itself.
In a larger sense I would suggest that what we see in terms of plagiarism is the equivalent of the effect that the entry of speed had on human transport regulation. Yes, horses could sometimes run fast but their efforts and the feeling speed exerted on a carriage told riders they had sped up. With a car it was just push the pedal harder and in an almost invisible way you accelerated. To deal with excessive speed we invented speedometers, and speed limits, and speed traps, and speeding tickets, and still people speed. They do it because they can. And easily. The internet and cutting and pasting has turned plagiarism into writing’s own version of zoom, zoom. I think while you can come up with ways of limiting and controlling plagiarism, it likely only going to get worse. Anything that is too easy to do, is almost impossible to do without.
Posted by stephen strauss on Sun 28 Feb 2010 at 03:43 PM
As we move away from printing interview notes and docs and keeping paper files of story research notes, I think it will become much easier for the best intentioned journalists to have the same problems as the two recent plagiarists. Mistakes are more likely when you are referring back to a 40-page Google Doc on deadline, searching for quotes and facts, but never seeing the whole file printed out. Maybe we all should have the same plagiarism software that universities use to check our own work?
Posted by Abby Gruen on Mon 1 Mar 2010 at 10:45 AM
My impression, as a news reader and not an editor or reporter, is that too many journalists these days - and business reporters in particular - report from press releases, using the press release as the first draft or starting point for the story, then adding in a touch of their own reporting. I think this is why so many stories on the same subject read so similarly. Or if it's not the press release, it's the AP report, with a few not-so-original and fairly obvious additions of their own. It's all too rarely that a story is reported from scratch and all original reporting.
Posted by Diana Finch on Tue 2 Mar 2010 at 11:08 PM
Thanks to all for these very useful advices.
As a new journalist and editor, and I admit I have no such load and pressure as mentioned above, the question it suggests to me is: «what is the reasonable amount of source text in a report?»
Given that we should have written and typed the whole story, except quotations, and that a text clogged with quotations is unreadable, what is the matter of copying and pasting? With no paste, there is no risk of plagiarism left.
Writing is still a think task, or should it be ...except sports analysis by computer (the ultimate plagiarism). ;)
Posted by Nicolas Falcimaigne on Thu 11 Mar 2010 at 11:45 PM
Very good article with informative comments. Although I am an academician and not a journalist I feel the same pertains to all writing. I intend to give it to my advanced students -- yes, cut and paste (with attribution) -- only changing the word "journalists" to researchers and writers. Thanks!
Posted by John Hudelson on Fri 12 Mar 2010 at 04:00 PM