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Contrary to what we
said in our email from Gustavus (Alaska), page 16, August 29, Catherine
the Great did not sell Alaska to the US in 1867. Russia did indeed sell
Alaska that year but Catherine had nothing to do with it. She died in
1796.
In our note on the Channel 4 programme The Sperminator, page 20, G2, yesterday, we referred to the "sperm doner". Someone who donates is a donor. A doner is a type of kebab.
A photo caption with an Aug. 29 article on the MTV
Video Music Awards reversed the identifications of rapper Snoop Dogg
and Sean "Diddy" Combs, the host of the show.
In the story headlined ''2ND LD: Woman injures herself near prime minister's office,'' please note following CORRECTION. At 2nd graf, please change the age of the woman to 50 from ''apparently in her 30s.''
From Michael Barone's blog:
In my August 25 post I made a mistake...
The blogger I cited was not Jeff Jarvis, of www.buzzmachine.com (http://www.buzzmachine.com), but Jay Rosen, of New York University. Since I linked to the correct post (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/08/19/ab_rlfwd.html), many readers may well have caught the error and therefore were not materially misled. Still, I'm sorry for the sloppiness, and I apologize to Jay Rosen and to Jeff Jarvis. In his courteous E-mail pointing out my mistake, Rosen notes that many people confuse him and Jarvis and wonders why. My reply was that both have first names starting with J and both seem (to me anyway) to specialize in intelligent press criticism not from a right-of-center perspective--a small category, I think.
In the wake of this very clear case of visual plagiarism, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has fired the photographer in question. Below is a note from the paper's managing editor. Looks like this was a combination of an unethical photographer, a summer intern, and lax editing policies. (As a side note, what's with the ALL CAPS and strange ending to this piece?)
You can see for yourself that our Metro Business cover photo Monday about a Richmond-area candy company copied the Style Weekly cover of December 22.
We conducted a review after the similarity in the covers was brought to our attention late Monday afternoon.
We learned that the photographer had seen the Style photo while at the candy company, and was told of the similarity, but submitted the picture anyway as original work. That is visual plagiarism and that is why we have dismissed the photographer.
Our review also found troublesome similarities between the Metro Business article and Style's that raised questions about several newsroom processes.
The Metro Business article was written by a summer intern who has since returned to college. She should have received more guidance and editing on this story -- a journalistic version of tough love, if you will -- than she got.
I spoke with her Thursday, and she said she learned a lot from this experience. We have, too.
The editing was cursory throughout, from the photo editing to the copy editing. Hindsight is wonderful, but a pattern of careful editing could have uncovered some clues. For instance, one photo was strikingly different from all the others shot for the assignment. Historical background was unusually detailed for this type of article.
- WE ARE changing the way we introduce our interns to the newsroom. When they arrive, we will do more than hand them a copy of our Guidelines for Professional Conduct. We will talk about the Guidelines with them, with emphasis on integrity and intellectual honesty.
- We are reassessing the practice of handing out a clipping of an entire article as background for an assignment. Isn't giving a clip of even one of our own articles just increasing the chance a journalist will lean on it too much?
- We were already revising our Guidelines for Professional Conduct. But we need to be more specific about not copying the work of others, whether verbal or visual, and about giving credit for ideas that we think are good enough to imitate.
And we need to talk more about ethics in general. One question that arose was: Is there such a thing as visual plagiarism? Some reporters and editors were not familiar with photojournalists' ethical standards, and we need to foster communications to increase understanding.
"THIS IS ABOUT us" and our standards, a copy editor said during a newsroom discussion last week. He was right.
In the future, if anyone on our staff ever gets wind of something like this, we want it to be second nature to say, "Wait a minute! You can't do that! We don't do that!"
Gawker got its hands on a New York Times memo that is also a correction. It seems that the address provided for people to send books to imprisoned Times staffer Judith Miller was wrong. (Gawker headlined the item, "They Probably Got the Address From Chalabi." Ouch.) The memo, as printed by Gawker:
August 22, 2005
Judy Miller Address Correction
The address to send books to Judy Miller was incorrect. The error was caught by C.J. Satterwhite, a news assistant for City Weekly, who had a 34-lb box of books returned to her.
Here is the correct address:
Barbara Brincefield
Cahill, Gordon, Reindel
1990 K St. N.W., Suite 950
Washington, DC 20006
An obituary about R.F. Scott, chief designer of the scoop that first
tested the moon's surface, misstated the date on which Neil Armstrong
first set foot on the moon. It was July 20, 1969, not July 16.
From Montreal's The Gazette:
A story in Wednesday's paper said incorrectly Richer Lapointe, the owner of the hardware store where Karla Homolka was employed, had been convicted of hashish possession during the 1980s. In fact, the person convicted was another man with the same name.
A picture in the Book Review last Sunday, with a review of "Redemption:
The Life of Henry Roth," by Steven G. Kellman, was mislabeled by the
supplier, Getty Images, and published in error. And a correction on
this page the same day provided a second erroneous identification from
the same agency. Relatives of the man pictured say he was Lawrence
Roth, a plaintiff in Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 Supreme Court case that
ended state-prescribed prayer in public schools - not the author Henry
Roth and not a lawyer named Henry Roth, who was cited in the
correction.
In the obituary of Hamilton Naki on June 11, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Naki helped Dr. Christiaan Barnard perform the world's first heart transplant. This was based on AP articles, including comments from Naki and Barnard, on April 4, 1993, and June 20, 2003.
Doctors from the University of Cape Town say this widely reported story of his involvement in the operation has gone uncorrected since 1993 and is not true. In published letters to leading British medical journals, Prof. David Dent, acting dean of the faculty of health sciences at the University of Cape Town, said Naki was a skilled surgical assistant but was not present at the hospital when the world's first heart transplant was performed in 1967.
The university says Naki assisted with the research on animals which lay the groundwork for the transplant. In interviews before Barnard's death, Barnard frequently spoke of Naki's great surgical contribution.
This correction has been widely published. See here. And the New York Times ran an article that looks at how this error became an accepted part of his biography.
