Regret the Error

AJC reporter resigns after plagiarizing; the lack of a plagiarism standard

A reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has resigned after 12 of the 28 paragraphs in an article by him "were exact or close replicas" of those contained in a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, according to a letter to readers written by AJC editor Julia Wallace Friday. Wallace said the Post-Gazette piece appeared on January 24, and the AJC piece appeared on March 3. Don Plummer, an AJC reporter for nearly 14 years, told AP that the plagiarism was a result of a "miscommunication" between him and his editor. Says Plummer:

"It was not complete and it was still in process and due to a miscommunication between me and my editor, who I think legitimately thought it was ready for editing and publication, it got into the paper," he said. Plummer said the paragraphs in question included information that he was planning to update and localize for Georgia readers.
He said, "The part in this whole thing that I regret is not raising an alarm early and getting this thing corrected quickly."

The full text of Wallace's letter is below.

This comes on the heels of an incident at Canada's Globe And Mail last week where a writer copied (almost exactly in some cases) six parts from a story in The New Republic. Yet the writer in question, a freelancer, did not suffer any disciplinary action, and the Globe did not apologize to its readers (the AJC did), or see fit to have the communication come from its editor.  The AJC communication makes it clear that this was plagiarism, and also explains that this "is a clear violation of the newspaper's journalistic standards."
This contrast reveals a larger truth: there is no accepted industry standard for how to define plagiarism, or handle an incident. Every paper/magazine handles it differently, and the result is that many appear to put the emphasis on explaining away the incident as a simple matter of forgetting to attribute material.Thus our coinage of the term "inadvertent plagiarism." (We cataloged some recent mealy-mouthed excuses in our Globe And Mail post.)
So, is plagiarism strictly a numbers game? If you lift one paragraph, or six, is that just a failure of attribution? What about seven or 10? What if you say that you mistook the stolen material for your own. Is that acceptable? In the AJC example, the writer lifted 12 passages and had to resign. If he had only lifted five, could he have kept his job?
We don't ask these questions in a mocking tone. They are valid because it's almost impossible to resolve the different ways that newspapers handle plagiarism. Some see fit to fire the staffer and apologize to readers; others bury the incident in a correction, fail to explain clearly what happened, and just hope the whole thing goes away. Few take the time to investigate the previous work of the reporter in question.
It's unrealistic to expect managers at disparate news organizations to handle things in exactly the same way, but the inconsistency is maddening and undoubtedly confusing to readers. Worse, many papers fail to explain to readers how it investigated the incident, why it chose its particular course of action, and what the organization's code of ethics states about plagiarism. An incident of plagiarism is an arrow to heart of any news organization. But management must absorb the blow, engage a proper investigation, and take the time and space to communicate its action and standards to readers.
Plagiarism is just among the worst sins a journalist can commit; but failing to properly investigate and communicate it is just as bad.
The Wallace letter to readers:

An article published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 3 included extensive passages that replicated, verbatim and without attribution, passages in a similar article published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Jan. 24. Both articles focused on new federal investigations into businesses operated by Markell D. Boulis, a suspended chiropractor from Pittsburgh who was convicted of cocaine possession in Cobb County in 1993. In all, 12 of the 28 paragraphs in the AJC article were exact or close replicas of those contained in the Post-Gazette. The similarities were discovered by an AJC editor as a follow-up story was being discussed. Using another newspaper's work and words and representing them as our own is a clear violation of the newspaper's journalistic standards. We apologize to our readers, to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and to its reporter. The AJC reporter, Don Plummer, has expressed regret and resigned from the staff.

Warning on first, caution on second

In a report headed Shooting inquiry witness on a collision course, page 4, April 18, we said that deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Brian Paddick, had been responsible for a pilot scheme in south London in which people caught with small amounts of cannabis were "cautioned" rather than arrested. The point about the scheme was rather that people were "warned" rather than cautioned or, as was usually also necessary in the case of a caution, arrested. Warning and caution are legally different. The effect was to save police time. Link

Inadvertent plagiarism strikes The Globe And Mail

We have catalogued several recent instances of what we call "inadvertent plagiarism." This occures when a reporter "accidentally," "mistakenly," or "inadvertantly" "copies," "duplicates," or "fails to attribute" the work of another writer. Inadvertent plagiarism, as explained by several large North American newspapers, can often apply to entire paragraphs. It happened at the Montreal Gazette last summer, and at the New York Times and Baltimore Sun in December. It happened at the Toronto Star earlier this year when it plagiarized while lifting a 10-year old news item (the paper said it "should have credited Randy Cassingham's This is True web site and should have indicated quotes from his story.") While we're at it, the Rocky Mountain News last year dismissed its deputy editorial page editor after he "inappropriately duplicated wording from a Washington Post article."
Anything to avoid calling it straight-up plagiarism.
As we have noted before, this is a lame way to explain away plagiarism. The growing frequency of this excuse is disturbing, especially when most papers decline to investigate the prior work of the reporter. Accidents do happen, but readers are rarely offered any explanation as to how the paper confirmed that the incident was a one-time, "inadvertent" offense. This lack of transparency breeds suspicion.

We can now add another instance of accidental/inadvertent plagiarism to the growing list. A Globe And Mail story about Iran's president copied liberally from a story in The New Republic. Robert Alterman's blog, My Conservative Dreamworld, noted the similarities between the two stories after TNR's piece was reprinted in Canada's other national newspaper, the National Post. Then, two days later (yesterday), the Globe ran this "clarification" (but didn't place it on its online corrections page):

A profile of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that appeared in last Saturday's Focus section referred to a story about the Iranian President in the current issue of The New Republic. After an investigation by The Globe and Mail, it appears that notes by the author were mistakenly inserted into the story without proper attribution. The Globe has apologized to The New Republic and regrets the error.

Here's the problem: Alterman's post points out six different nearly identical sections of the Globe and TNR articles, some of which are quite long. How can the Globe possibly excuse this instance plagiarism as a case of "notes by the author...mistakenly inserted into the story..."? We've raised this question in the previous instances of inadvertent plagiarism, but, honestly, how can any writer mistake several passages of someone else's writing for their own?
The other disturbing element to this case is that the Globe appears to have taken no disciplinary action, nor has it deemed this worthy of an apology or editor's note. Strangely, the Globe saw the need to apologize to TNR, but not to its own readers. And it didn't place the "clarification" on its online corrections page.
Compare this with how the Montreal Gazette handled its case of inadvertent plagiarism. The columnist personally apologized to readers and the paper yanked her column for "several" weeks. There were still things to be desired about the paper's handling of the incident  -- she was "formally reprimanded," though readers had to guess what that meant, and she might have continued to sit on the paper's editorial board during her column's hiatus -- but it puts the Globe to shame.
A more detailed explanation of the Globe's investigation could help allay concerns about previous offenses and the nature of the "mistaken" plagiarism. A formal apology to readers would also be appropriate.

Lessons in geography, #508

Correction note to our readers: In yesterday's morning edition, the article "Jimmy Carter | Colonization of Palestine Precludes Peace" was correctly titled on the home page and article page, but not in the newsletter. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. --TO/vh

The newsletter version was titled, "Jimmy Carter on Israel's colonization of Pakistan."

Location, location, location

For more background on this and other Atlantic Yards corrections, visit Norman Oder's Atlantic Yards Report here.

Because of an editing error, an article in The Arts on Tuesday about Frank Gehry's design for the first phase of the Grand Avenue development project in Los Angeles misstated the location of the proposed Atlantic Yards project that Mr. Gehry is designing in Brooklyn. (The error also appeared in sports articles on Feb. 9 and April 11, in the City section on Jan. 15 and in several articles in 2003, 2004 and 2005.) It is on rail yards and other land in Prospect Heights and on a block in Park Slope; it is not in Downtown Brooklyn, although it is near that neighborhood. Link

We Crunked: Regret corrections

One post with two crunks to report this week. Enjoy our incompetence.

The Crunks:

• Our April 24 post, "The Medium Is the Massage," incorrectly stated that the title of Marshall McLuhan's well-known book was "The Medium Is the Message." While this was his famous declaration and the intended title of the book, it was not the final title. "The Medium Is the Massage" is the correct title. (Though it was the result of a typo; for background, read the post.) As a result, we incorrectly implied that New York Times Magazine writer Jaime Wolf had made a typo in an article about American Apparel owner Dov Charney. Adding insult to injury, we also misspelled Wolf's first name as "Jamie." The errors have been corrected and noted within the post. We apologize to Wolf for the wrongful typo charge.

Let Quebec succeed

The New York Sun yesterday ran an obit of Jane Jacobs that included a reference to her support of the Quebec separatist movement. Well, not exactly:

...Jacobs became a kind of Canadian national treasure, a valued luncheon companion of Toronto's mayor, and enough of an authority on national politics to write a book urging that Quebec be allowed to succeed on the grounds that it would be an economic boon to all. Her devotion to gemeinschaft seemed bottomless... Link (sub req'd)

We'd like to voice our support for the Quebec success movement as well.

A gallon of errors

A letter/correction:

COUNTRYSIDE: Thank you for printing my "Astronomy on the Homestead" article in your March-April, 2006 issue. I wanted to report a transliteration error in the article. On page 115, in the left column, theoriginal sentence in the second paragraph was "Although, theoretically, the gravitational acceleration constant of the earth is 980 gals each second ...," but it was printed as "980 gallons per second."
The word "gal" was not an abbreviation, it was a word. It originally was short for Galilei unit, the metric unit of acceleration, but nowadays the short form is fully standard. It is a mathematical unit known as a gal, and it has nothing to do with gallons. In physics it would not make sense to measure acceleration in gallons, just as it would not make sense to measure temperature in pounds.

Math is hard

On Tuesday's editorial page, the letter "Enjoying MySpace" contained a percentage error. The letter stated, "Six million people use MySpace, and if 600 become news items, that's only 1 percent." Six hundred is 0.01 percent of 6 million.

So how did it end up in the paper?

A story about the Liberal leadership race that appeared on page B1 on Saturday reported that former Ontario premier David Peterson had privately been quoted as saying he would tear Bob Rae apart "limb by limb" if he enters the contest. Mr. Peterson says he never made the remark. CanWest News Service apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused Mr. Peterson. Link

This also ran in the National Post, though it was not put on the paper's online corrections page. Link