Poynter on the Record

Interesting thoughts on plagiarism in Sunday's Sun-Times. In case you missed Mike Thomas' piece on the cover of the Controversy section, it said basically that we're seeing an increase in the instances of plagiarism in the newsroom because we, as veteran journalists, aren't doing enough to teach cub reporters what plagiarism is and to vet the stories our young reporters write to run in the paper.

Hogwash.

If any problem in America could be cured by a big dose of personal responsibility, this is it. ...

... In his piece, Thomas wrote (that's called attribution, or giving credit to the original writer): "Like bird flu and Arctic temperatures, plagiarism is on the rise. More than ever, it seems, writers siphon stuff from the Internet, books, magazines and newspapers and pass it off as their own, apparently oblivious to the seriousness of the ethical lapse . . . (ellipses denote that the quote continues beyond our purpose in lifting it)."

(The quote marks are important; they delineate an actual word-for-word lifting of the original prose.)

See? It's easy. A little attribution goes a long way.

Perhaps the problem is that there is no punishment to fit this crime, another point raised by Thomas (attribution again, this time without quotes to show that I have merely paraphrased his text, not borrowed it outright).

He quotes (once more, credit to the source) Poynter Institute senior faculty member and writing coach Chip Scanlan, who said that if you put plagiarism in a criminal context, we need to know, "Is there a plagiaristic misdemeanor? Is there a plagiarism felony? And if so, what are the punishments?"
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