John Koblin of the New York Observer had an exclusive interview with former New York Times business reporter Zachary Kouwe, who resigned Tuesday afternoon amid allegations of plagiarizing articles from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other business media outlets.
“Mr. Kouwe says he has never fabricated a story, nor has he knowingly plagiarized. ‘Basically, there was a minor news story and I thought we needed to have a presence for it on the blog,’ he said, referring to DealBook. ‘In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct. It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents.’
“‘I’ll go back and rewrite everything,’ he continued. ‘I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there. I think that’s what probably happened.'”
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>>throw it into our back-end publishing system...
That's what went wrong, right there. In a world where reports can quickly compile oceans of raw content with some Control-C and Control-V keystrokes, inevitably they will forget to re-process some of that material, and end up using someone else's content as their own-- probably without even realizing it. I believe Kouwe when he says he didn't know he was doing it. That is the risk of reporting in the mash-able world.
The lesson for journalism students-- don't cut-and-paste. When you see fresh material on the Web, pull out a pen and write it down in the notebook. Then type up your written notes into an electronic file that you sculpt down into a final text.
The lesson for publishers-- for the love of God, ease up on the production quotas. Did anyone out there really care that Kouwe posted some bit of business news on his blog in 15 minutes rather than 25, really? Did you need to embarrass your paper, alienate your readers, and wreck a reporter's career just to pound out a few more drops of content when we're already swimming in oceans of it? Yeesh.