I would have hired former Politico.com reporter Kendra Marr.
Why? Because her resume and my resume are so alike.
Same journalism undergrad and grad school. Same love of journalism. We both worked in the San Francisco Bay Area region. Both women of color. In other words, if I was a hiring editor interviewing her for a job, I would figure that we shared the same journalistic values.
Yet I also understand how the kind of plagiarism accusations lodged against her could lead a young reporter to resign from a good job.
Sure, the player has to shoulder the blame. But I blame the game, too.
These days chances are shrinking for an ambitious journalist to get a job that pays a middle-class salary with benefits. Young journalists no longer have the luxury of making mistakes out of the spotlight. If you want a job, you have to go directly into the big leagues. More likely than not, your job will be on the growing digital media side of the business. The side, to be polite, that is more like the Wild West than reasoned halls of journalism school.
What’s more, the Internet, and its research techniques, make it easy to find facts, stories, sources and so much more. A lot of the material is already written in coherent sentences and has attribution, which under the current rules of the game, can be an embedded link to the original news story.
Don’t get me started about cutting and pasting. Yes, I can understand how someone can cut and paste reference material on the wrong take (Google Docs, anyone?) and, in the rush to deadline, forget what is yours and what belongs to someone else. These days it’s just too easy to make a series of career-ending errors early in the game.
But the game deserves blame, too.
Let’s get real. In the world of Web journalism, lightly-sourced material (Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel call it “the journalism of assertion” rather than a journalism based on verification) is pretty much the norm. Whether it’s an advocate using crowdsourcing to flesh out a tip, a reader passing along a rumor, or a pro filing a single-source anecdote to make another blog entry, much of what the audiences reads online just isn’t sourced the same way as traditional newspaper or magazine articles.
Not only are single- or no-source articles common, it’s often difficult to tell who wrote a piece. With so many website competing for ad dollars, many publishers cut expenses by programming scripts to scrape or aggregate content from other sources, rather than paying reporters to write their own stories. Once, much of this would have been accepted widely as plagiarism. Today, it’s grudgingly accepted as a way “to increase traffic.”
In this atmosphere, there’s no denying that speed is an asset – but one that can kill careers, too. Being first, especially for websites such as Politico, is important. Maybe too important. Add to the “we’re first” syndrome with making sure your posts get seen before anyone else’s on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and whatever other flavor-of-the-day social media channel you use to hype your story, and you really might not have time to wait for that phone call or seek out an original source.
We even brag about how fast we get material up. Here’s what Adam Moss, editor of the New York Times Magazine said recently at Harvard: “The editing process online is zero, pretty much… I’m not that comfortable with that, but that’s practical reality. It’s a speed business.”
Let’s face it, we’re making up the rules while the game is underway. We hope that the traditional journalism ethics will work in the online world. We hope the foundations of accurate reporting, photography, design and editing will be transferred to a new generation. But newsroom veterans–the few that are left in newsrooms–are barely addressing these issues. I don’t know the reason. No time? Maybe. No backing from management? Maybe. No backbone? Maybe. An inner belief that these ethical lapses will all self correct when cooler heads are at the helm? Probably.
The easy way out is to take complaints of plagiarism seriously. Investigate. Allow the player the fall on his or her sword and either be suspended or resign. Then you post a detailed correction on the site, and add a paragraph or two about holding the newsroom to the highest of journalistic standards. Finally, you move on to the next news cycle.
We have to do more, too. The first step is to acknowledge that there are systemic problems in the current practice of Web journalism. These problems have created a breeding ground for ethical lapses. Yes, this is a harsh view, but until we all admit this, we can’t begin to fix the situation.
Le’s stop blaming the players. Let’s get real about changing the game.
