More on NYT plagiarism case

Paul Smalera of True/Slant writes Monday about what he thinks went wrong in the plagiarism case involving New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe.

Smalera writes, “Some, including Craig Silverman make the case (or at least supply the facts for others to make) that plagiarism detection software might be a good thing for newsrooms to invest in, to scan their own reporters’ stories for potential sourcing problems. I have to completely disagree. But not because I’m worried about newsrooms turning all Big Brother on their own reporters. No, I think, as evidenced by Kouwe’s lame excuses, both to the media, and to the bloggers from which he stole, he knew what he was doing, and chose to continue doing it, due either to pressure he put on himself, or the newspaper’s editors put on him, productivity-wise. The problem is not one of software detection algorithms, but of human decision making.

“Putting myself in Kouwe’s shoes for a second, he says he was filing upwards of 7,000 words a week, of hard-fact copy, for DealBook, the Andrew Ross Sorkin-founded business blog that’s in some ways become the flagship of the Times’ online business reporting. Now, honestly, for the type of bold-faced, big name stories the paper covers, any experienced business editor has to realize that one reporter can’t possibly turn in that much originally reported hard news, consistently, week after week. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Kouwe naturally scanned the wires, blogs, press releases, etc., to stay on top of breaking news; he also read what others had the time to report and posted relevant stories to DealBook. All of that is kosher; that’s how a blog works. But copying and pasting paragraphs of text into your editing software, without including the URL, or a note to yourself of the source, is not being lazy or sloppy; it’s the first step of willful omission of the sourcing, whether it happens in your Word document or WordPress backend.

“What’s also not OK is that Kouwe, in his note to Teri Buhl (linked above, which Felix Salmon reported) tried to argue his way out of giving proper sourcing to Buhl’s story, months before his episode with the Journal. I have to assume this is because Kouwe felt the pressure from the newspaper’s editors to provide a certain amount of original reporting in his stories. So he justified copy/pasting excerpts of other people’s work by convincing himself that sourcing wasn’t necessary because he had thrown some of his own reporting on top of the original story.”

Read more here.