The media drama surrounding Jonah Lehrer continued Thursday with author Malcolm Gladwell offering a weak defense of his embattled colleague, who’s been accused of “self-plagiarism” for reusing parts of old stories for other publications in blog posts for The New Yorker and Wired.
Gladwell, to whom Lehrer has often been compared, told WWD:
The conventions surrounding what is and is not acceptable in magazine writing, books and speaking have been worked out over the past 100 years. The conventions over blogging are being worked out as we speak… Everyone who writes for a living is going to learn from this. I’m just sorry Jonah had to bear the brunt of it.
While it’s true that a lot of writers will learn from this, the first part of Gladwell’s statement is ridiculous. Yes, people are still working out what does and does not work on blogs, but what Lehrer did has nothing to do with those mutable conventions. It has to do with one of the most basic and established conventions of journalism: honest reporting.
The Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s Paul Raeburn said it best:
If anyone tells you the Lehrer situation is complicated, don’t believe it. The journalism issues are simple, and clear: Don’t deceive editors. And, far more importantly, don’t deceive readers.
So true. Yet, arguing that Lehrer’s mistake falls relatively low on the list of journalistic “crimes and misdemeanors,” New Yorker editor David Reminick also played the conventions-of-blogging card. “This was wrong and foolish, and I think he thought that it was OK to do this in the blogging context — and he is obviously wrong to think so,” he told MarketWatch.
What’s not as explicit as it should be in that comment is that Lehrer should have known better. It’s hard to believe he didn’t, though it’s clear to him now. “It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” Lehrer told The New York Times.
Enough said. The principles of honest and transparent reporting apply to every medium. That much should have been obvious all along, and regardless what future platforms emerge—from electronic thought transference to smoke signals—the same rules will apply to them, too.
Hey, I don't see what the problem is if you want to be known as the Nickelback of blogging, copy yourself away.
You might want to make sure the people you sold your work to are okay with it since they paid you for that work, not a license to that work, but if your present employer and past employers are satisfied with the services of Nickelback, who are we to judge?
Writing should be treated in the way software code is treated. You can go to Microsoft and write a driver for a printer, then you can go to Apple and do the same.
But you can't take the files from Microsoft computers and bring them with you to Apple. Knowledge and skill are transferable, production is not. That is property which you have traded away the rights to for money (unless otherwise stipulated in the contract).
Leher can copy and paste all the content he owns the rights to he wants, but if he sold those rights, he has to recreate the content so that the production is original, even if the ideas are not.
According to economist typepad Robert Samuelson manages to recycle old ideas into new columns. And David Brooks hasn't had new ideas for the time he's been in the news that's fit to print. They manage to take stale ideas and make original columns.
It's lazy and it's likely tedious, but it can be done lucratively. Maybe one of these columnists could give lessons to the young Nickelback.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 21 Jun 2012 at 05:35 PM
The June 21 issue of The New York Review of Books is at least 1000 times better than this (or last) week's "The New Yorker.
If I were the mayor of New York, I would encourage wealthy business people etc to set up a support fund for The NYRB so that it could publish 26 times a year, 100 pages per.
The letters section, though, at The NYRB, is sad. It needs a five page carefully nurtured letters section.
Over the past few years, The NYT Book Review has not distinguished itself. However, The NYT coverage of Lehrer's dishonesty has been excellent. The NYT should suspend Lehrer from contributing to its pages for two years.
Unless he continues to allow his friends to justify his behavior, in which case the suspension should be five years.
The editor of The New Yorker should be fired. I will not read the magazine again as long as he is editor.
In the NY (weekend) competition:
1.NYRB
2.NYT
3.WSJ
4.The also ran. The New Yorker. The rating: 'Distinctly unreliable'.
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 22 Jun 2012 at 01:08 PM