COMM 317: Plagiarism for grownups

Plagiarism isn't just for schoolkids! Professional writers can do it, too. And without meaning to. In fact, usually they don't mean to when they do it. Just like in school, huh? Here are some links to bring you up to speed on how it happens, why it happens and what it leads to. Firing, typically. But not always.

Here are some links to fill you in on the basics.

Roy Peter Clark, senior writing coach at the Poynter Institute, a newspaper think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla., has an overview of plagiarism. Clark says the consequences are serious, "with malefactors suffering all kinds of fates, from suicide to firing to, strangest of all, consignment to the copy desk."

To the copy desk? That's where news stories are checked for errors. Last place in the newsroom I'd want someone who can't keep his sources straight.

"Thank you, Mr. Fox, you are now in charge of the henhouse," says Clark.

Clark links to a 2004 story in The Seattle Times, about how alert readers tipped the paper on a plagiarized business column and how management smoked out the writer (who is no longer working for The Times). It should be pointed out he was a 37-year veteran of the news business, and his plagiarism does not appear to have been intentionally dishonest.

Clark's piece on plagiarism is a survey titled "The Unoriginal Sin." (Great title!) And it appeared in Washington Journalism Review in 1983. After citing several examples, Clark wrote:

Almost every newspaper I have consulted offers an anecdote about serious plagiarism. I have heard of editorials copied word for word from The New York Times and government handouts. I have heard, but have not been able to verify, stories about a managing editor at a small paper who routinely plagiarized stories from newsmagazines, stole a whole series from a larger newspaper and even stuck his name over the work of his own reporters. Such a man might have inspired Samuel Johnson's famous piece of sarcasm: "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

Plagiarism in newspapers (ethical plagiarism, that is, not the violation of copyright, which is a legal question) is more common than imagined and in many cases escapes detection. Most cases are cloudier and less spectacular than the ones cited above. Like defensive pass interference in football, they may be blatant or accidental, but they always deserve the yellow flag.

Two important points here. One is that plagiarism is a question of ethics -- some would say moral values -- rather than law. If the words involved are under copyright, then it becomes a legal question too. But the basic problem is one of ethics.

The other important point is that plagiarism by professional writers is not usually intentional. Clark said it grows out of the way journalists go about their business, the way we do research:

Part of the problem is that all good reporters compile, borrow and assimilate. "Writers do not read for fun," writes T. S. Garp. They read for work. They borrow juxtapositions, images, metaphors, rhythms, puns, emphases, structures, word orders, alliterations and startling facts. They store these in their memory banks and in their commonplace books [notebooks of quotations that people used to keep as sort of a writer's journal]. Months later these words emerge in a new context and with personal meaning, having become their own.

Journalists, like scholars, write within a climate of ideas, ideas that fly from newspaper to newspaper like migrating birds. The hardworking and curious reporter explores each new idea and collects everything on the landscape. But embedded in these good habits are dangers, for both the unprincipled and the undisciplined.

There is a lot in Clark's description that I recognize in my own writing. I don't keep an old-fashioned commonplace book. Instead, like many professional writers, I clip stories, or print them out, and put them in what I call a "swipe file." Clark speaks of "ethically ambiguous practices that go on each day in newsrooms." He doesn't mention swipe files. But doesn't that name speak volumes? Why do I call it a "swipe" file and not an "inspiration" file or even a "commonplace" file? There are plenty of other ambiguous practices, too.

And there are some good ways to guard against them. One, Clark says, is to check out what you see in the clips. Always. Even your own clips. Says Clark:

Plagiarism is a substitute for reporting [I would say a poor substitute]. A reporter who assumes the accuracy of information in the clips or in wire stories or in textbooks is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Of course, reporters consider the source of information and are always fighting the clock. But to the extent that they depend upon the work and words of others, they distance themselves from events and people and create an environment for inaccuracy. Important mistakes, especially when they turn up in usually reliable sources of information, become fossilized in the clips. ...