The author of a recent book about how creativity works is finding out the hard way that the answer is more elusive than he imagined.
Jonah Lehrer, one of science journalism’s brightest young stars, was accused of self-plagiarism on Tuesday after critics revealed that he had reused parts of old stories he wrote for other publications in blog posts for The New Yorker. So far, the magazine has appended an editors’ note to the top of six of Lehrer’s eight posts for its website, noting where else the copy had appeared and expressing “regret [for] the duplication of material.”
Lehrer, 31, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment, but “he understands he made a mistake, he’s apologetic, and it won’t happen again,” said The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, who made a splash when he left features editing in March to manage and expand the magazine’s website.
New Yorker editors other than Thompson declined to comment on the matter. But so far, it seems that Lehrer’s status there hasn’t changed. “We’re not happy. It won’t happen again,” Thompson told Jim Romenesko who first spotted the problem and broke the story.
It was only two weeks ago that Lehrer, who has been writing for The New Yorker’s print edition since 2008, announced that he had accepted a staff writer position there and that he was bringing along his blog, Frontal Cortex, from fellow Condé Nast title Wired. All five of the posts that he’s written since then, and one that he wrote for NewYorker.com in 2011, contain recycled text.
Romenesko pointed out that three paragraphs in Lehrer’s most recent New Yorker post came, practically verbatim, from a piece he’d written for The Wall Street Journal last October. New York Magazine’s Joe Coscarelli and freelancer Jacob Silverman dug up other instances of alleged self-plagiarism at The New Yorker as well as Wired, where Lehrer reused parts of work he’d done for The New York Times Magazine.
A Wired spokesperson said that, like The New Yorker, it plans to review Lehrer’s work and append editors’ note flagging posts that contain duplicated materials and indicating their origins. “Jonah’s insights, ideas, and research have always been of great interest to Wired readers,” said the spokesperson. “While this recent disclosure may be embarrassing for him, it does not diminish his work as a valued contributor to the magazine and website.”
Valued or not, a media onslaught ensued in response to the allegations.
Reactions at Slate and PaidContent.org argued that Lehrer’s mistake was the result of his busy schedule on the lecture circuit, where presentations promoting his books and ideas are often basically the same. They also pointed out that Lehrer has been compared to his New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell, another popular “idea man,” but one who’s been more cautious. In 2004, Gladwell published a lengthy disclosure statement on his blog discussing why the fact that he “wears two hats”—as a writer for the magazine and as a paid speaker promoting his work—can, but usually doesn’t, lead to conflicts of interest.
Indeed, there’s nothing wrong with branching out into speaking and a variety of media platforms. Journalists have always done this, and most would if they got the chance. But the practice is becoming more common, necessary, and fraught in today’s fragmented media world, in which young reporters have to promote their “brands” to survive.
Perhaps Lehrer got caught up in the general loosening of attribution standards, or maybe it’s just better media monitoring. Whatever the case, the rules against all manner of journalistic recycling, from sloppy attribution, to self-plagiarism, to plagiarism, are part of the basic dos-and-don’ts of the craft. Lehrer’s many fans deserve an explanation, and hopefully they’ll get one.
Update: Reached by phone, Lehrer told The New York Times, “It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong.”
The entire notion of self-plagiarism sounds ludicrous to me. He is being accused of borrowing from himself. Why is this wrong?
I could understand that the publishers might be irritated, seeing ideas that appeared first in the WSJ, let's say, reappear on The New Yorker's web site. But that strikes me as a squabble among venues, of little interest or consequence to the average reader.
Why should the average reader care if the journalist has recycled his own ideas in different settings?
#1 Posted by Duncan Moore, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 01:33 PM
It's wrong because the words, and the ideas they expressed, appeared in another publication, one that holds the copyright. He's fortunate that Wired appears to be pretty relaxed about this, seeing this as more of an embarrassment to Lehrer than anything, according to Curtis' reporting. But, it's also wrong because it's lazy. Sure, I understand that it's difficult sometimes to find new ways to say the same things when you are working on parallel projects. But that is the standard we hold for anything published in the public domain. You may reiterate, rephrase, reemphasize, recharacterize, or reexplain the same ideas in a new place, but don't actually repeat verbatim the same words you used previously, unless you provide proper attribution. Plain and simple.
#2 Posted by Tom Schoenfeld, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 03:07 PM
So, therefore: ... "as I have previously written in The Wall Street Journal."
That would solve the problem?
Again, I don't think readers, as opposed to journalism theorists and policy enforcers, care two whits about this.
#3 Posted by Duncan Moore, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 03:18 PM
Yeah, you may be right, that most readers won't care. But integrity is still a value of importance to the profession, and to writers more generally, including to scientists like me. Jonah's reputation among readers may not suffer as much as Curtis implies. But it certainly may suffer a bit among his colleagues. Besides, as Curtis alludes, it is ironic that the author of "Creativity" was not, in this instance, creative.
#4 Posted by Tom Schoenfeld, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 03:42 PM
As long its in a blog, who cares, right? "No harm, no foul"?
On the other hand, readers, editors or publishers who are actually paying consumers of content might be under the impression that they had purchased new or original work. I would expect that casual reselling of previously published work might easily break the terms of a publishing or syndication deal. Here, maybe nobody actually broke a money deal, but the case illustrates the dilution of value possibly associated with the presumably miserable returns from a writing career these days.
#5 Posted by MadEye, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 03:46 PM
Of course, we really ought to be looking more closely at what the man is actually being accused of. In comparing two matched pieces, an original from Wired (Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up, 12/21/09) and the one with copied text in The New Yorker (WHY WE DON’T BELIEVE IN SCIENCE, 6/7/12), I don't see much at all that is truly verbatim. The set up to each is different, and even the use of the same source, a scientist named Dunbar, involves largely different material, with the exception of one story about how students must fight intuition to correctly judge how balls of different mass will fall. It's the latter that appears to be self-plagiarized. All Lehrer needed to do here was, as Duncan Moore suggests, to mention the previous post in Wired as a previous telling of the story, and change a few words around to avoid the need for quotes. If this exemplifies what the other instances of plagiarism are like, I suspect this whole thing will die down very quickly.
#6 Posted by Tom Schoenfeld, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 04:14 PM
Thanks to Tom Schoenfeld for checking out the particulars behind this kerfuffle. As he says, there may be less here than meets the eye.
I have always understood plagiarism to mean the unauthorized appropriation of another's published work under one's own name. It's lifting sentences, paragraphs, or blocks of copy -- even whole chapters sometimes -- and asserting authorship. This misleads readers, editors, and publishers into believing you thought this material up and drafted it yourself, when you didn't. This would be wrong.
I don't think plagiarism, as understood above, has anything to do with what Jonah Lehrer is accused of doing. What he has done would be more truthfully described as self-recycling. He thought the material up and drafted it himself, but he used it in two places. Have the readers been mislead? Misinformed? Has another author been harmed? Who, in reality, suffers injury here?
Well, possibly the editor and the publisher, as Madeye notes in her comment, if they are unaware of the author's previous publications on this topic. That would warrant a business conversation among the author, editor, and publisher. But I do not see the harm to the reader or to another original author that the term "plagiarism" implies.
#7 Posted by Duncan Moore, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 05:55 PM
Wait--Lehrer didn't just plagiarize himself, he also plagiarized other writers. He lifted Peter Dizikes's reporting and quotes without attribution, and presented them as his own. He also plagiarized Malcolm Gladwell.
Details here:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all
*Editor’s Note: Noam Chomsky’s comments about M.I.T.’s Building 20 were not made directly to Jonah Lehrer, nor was a colleague’s description of Chomsky’s and Morris Halle’s offices as “the two most miserable holes in the whole place.” Chomsky and his colleague were interviewed by Peter Dizikes for his article in the November/December issue of Technology Review.
And here: http://www.edrants.com/how-jonah-lehrer-recycled-his-own-material-for-imagine/
#8 Posted by scientist, CJR on Thu 21 Jun 2012 at 11:03 AM
Curtis,
Very nice piece, and I was especially interested to be reminded of your piece last year on Carl Safina's book. You were kind to call that a "general loosening of attribution standards."
My take on Lehrer is up on the Tracker.
#9 Posted by Paul Raeburn, CJR on Thu 21 Jun 2012 at 02:04 PM