A few months ago, my brother wrote a story about a woman who passed away and left 2,000 descendants. He wrote it for a small-ish newpaper that serves the Hudson Valley in New York. A few weeks later, the New York Times wrote nearly an identical column and even used one of the photographs from the original story. Clearly, the author had learned of the story though my brother's article. My brother and his local paper were never mentioned in the article, and I wrote a huffy blog post about it.
I understand that this happens all the time. Journalists and editors don't come up with ideas for stories out of the ether. They get story ideas from other newspapers and from conversations with others. They also get a lot of ideas from the blogosphere. If there's a lot of buzz about a topic in the blogosphere, that topic will be in the media within a week. I've seen it happen quite a bit, and journalists have admitted as much to me.
It's just annoying that the media doesn't give credit to the source of ideas, especially ideas that are in printed form in other newspapers or in the blogosphere. It's more than annoying. In academia, we cite EVERYTHING. Everything sentence will have a long string of citations. In the blogging world, we always provide a link to the where we first read the article. It's bad form to not include that "hat tip."
Lately, there has been a call for major media to embrace the hyperlink and to give credit to idea sources. See Alex Weprin and Danny Sullivan.
Apt. 11d 
I’m not sure why it’s “more than annoying.” Academia and journalism have different norms. In academia, citations ensure, if not perfect reliability, at least higher reliability than is normal in journalism. Also, being cited is taken as a recognition of scholarly quality and translates, albeit slowly and indirectly, into higher income. In journalism, how would our hostess’s brother be better off if the Times article had a parenthetical clause noting that the subject of the article had previously been portrayed in another newspaper? Would he get a raise? A promotion? I don’t think so, which is why such unattributed borrowing qualifies as no more than annoying.
Incidentally, it’s the same in the practice of law: no one scruples to copy well-drafted legal documents without attribution. If you practice in a relatively narrow field, especially if you are one of the first to deal with a new legal issue, you can expect to see language you drafted repeated in other people’s documents for years.
I’m not sure if the “hat tip” convention exists in blogging outside the legal/scholarly blogosphere which circumscribes my reading universe. It would be interesting if it does.
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“In journalism, how would our hostess’s brother be better off if the Times article had a parenthetical clause noting that the subject of the article had previously been portrayed in another newspaper? Would he get a raise? A promotion?”
I think the standards are different in academia, where the citation is the currency of prestige. But, journalists would benefit, too. It would drive traffic to his site. It would increase the likelihood that his article would be noticed. It might increase the possibility of a new opportunity.
Of course, I was raised in the academic realm, so cites matter to me, philosophically and morally. I also know, though, that it can be difficult to cite the source of an idea. Ideas do grow out of the ether. It’s part of the reason that I’m deeply uncomfortable with copyright/design copyright/patent law when it tries to infuse legal rights to the development of ideas.
But, I do think people should cite where they think they can, when they do believe they got the idea from somewhere they can reproduce. They should do it because it’s right, but because it can also make a difference, for something like journalism.
Law is different from journalism — you get paid upfront for your intellectual property. This does drive some lawyers crazy, but the fact is, that you can’t copyright your legal draft, and so the system is set up to compensate you before, and not after your ideas earn importance.
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Comedians.
Ok, I hesitate to tell this story, because it is self-promoting, but it illustrates the failure of academics to understand other cultures perfectly.
A few years ago I attended a conference in Britain at which a senior government advisor was speaking. He was using notes, and at a certain point he (rather to my surprise) started saying things critical of his own government’s policy that I completely agreed with. In fact, after about a minute or so, I started to notice that not only did I agree with what he was saying, but it seemed to me that I had, in fact, written what he was saying. Almost to the letter — he was using exactly the same numbers I had used in my writing to illustrate a particular point. (In fact, for a while I was quite puzzled because I couldn’t remember actually publishing what he was saying). It went on for about 5 minutes. My initial (but, I’m glad to say, short-lived) reaction was outrage at having been plagiarised. It was when I remembered where I’d published the piece (in a Labour Party think-tank publication, which was circulated to every delegate of the previous year’s party conference) that I realized “oh, yes, that was the point — to get them to internalize and accept my criticism, not to be cited by them”.
But, there’s a huge difference. Totally different professions. Their norms do not require citation, and nor should they. He was doing his job — finding good ideas from wherever and making them his own. In the case of your brother, it seems to me, that the NYT, having identified his story, should have paid him or his employer for it. It seems to me just lazy to write someone else’s story.
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I grew up swimming in the academic kool aid, so cites are something dear to me as well (although I’m more ingrained with the practices of the science field than social sciences, to be fully honest), but I do also think there is a bit of dishonesty here.
If you think of the awards for journalism, or the image of the journalist, it’s of someone who does the legwork and discovers a story, not someone who was surfing around and made a term paper out of a neat webpage they found. I certainly hope that the NYT reporter at least included some information not in Laura’s brother’s story. (On the other hand, I don’t have such a high opinion of the reporting staff there that it has much further to fall….) At the least I hope no awards are passed out to the second upon the scene, unless the story was really so awesomely improved.
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I was on my high school paper and we were required to bring in story ideas from other places (then just clips from newspapers and magazines – this was way back in the 80s); this was a standard way of figuring out good topics.
Rules for citation were very strict for the human sources of information – you quoted people directly or attributed information to them, and we had to go back to the source and doublecheck that any direct quotes were absolutely correct. If you took a direct quote from another newspaper, say the Times quoting Obama, you would refer to them. Also, sometimes if another newspaper did some investigative work you’d cite that (“Documents uncovered by the Washington Post…”).
At that point the issue was timing – most of all we wanted to “scoop” other papers by reporting something time-sensitive first. This is probably still true today – if your brother had done some investigative work or was the first to report some big political scandal, they might have credited him. But I’m not sure how this works today.
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Was your face very red as that was happening, harry b? What a bizarre story! I’m afraid that it might have taken me quite a long time to move from the first instance of anger at being plagarized.
Other than one example of harry’s, idea-swiping w/out attribution really pisses me off. In academia, not only it is considered very bad form to not attribute, but you lose credibility. If you are writing about social capital and don’t cite Robert Putnam, people think that you’re a dolt.
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“If you are writing about social capital and don’t cite Robert Putnam, people think that you’re a dolt.”
But Putnam is just one of the most recent users of the term and the concept–it has a much longer history (which I think Putnam discusses).
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I recently started working as a journalist, and just had my first experience of having a story idea ripped off. The text I sweated to create from a lengthy interview was further condensed by another person. All my ideas and facts, and their order of presentation, were preserved. I got mad because there was no attribution. I thought less of the person so being so lazy. And ultimately, I feel that it encourages laziness among journalists. Why bother to go hunt up something new when I can just grab something from someone else and get the same level of reward for it?
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As a reader, I would find it tedious to see journalists talk about the sources of ideas for news stories in cases like your brother’s, and in cases like the linked one about Googlemaps. (This is not true in Katie’s case above, where the interviewer should be cited.) News stories are short enough anyway. What I want to know when I read these stories is what happened, and what the evidence is for it actually happening.
When I’m reading an academic journal article, *then* I want to know the origin of the idea and whether others have written about it. For news, I couldn’t care less whether 75 other news outlets have written about it or none. If I had some kind of personal contact with the reporter and he/she failed to mention it to me when discussing the origin of the story, that would be wrong, but if it’s CNN I don’t care. Maybe this is a remaining difference between bloggers, who are like “friends” of their readers, and news reporters, who are not.
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Laura — I wasn’t red-faced. I did hang around to try and chat with him afterward, but there was a crowd and in the end I couldn’t be bothered. I guess that it was very easy for me to make the switch partly because I get a lot of ideas attributed to me (some falsely!), and partly because I realised that I really did write that piece to try and influence government thinking, and having the influence, not having it acknowledged in public, is what mattered to me.
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Years ago, I wrote a blog post in my city’s LJ community about a guy in this confusing little corner of the city who had put a mailbox outside his house with a big sign saying “Free Maps to Airport.”
The story got picked up by a series of blogs and wound up as a story on the TV news. One of the weird aspects of seeing it on the news — all the bloggers, of course, had conscientiously linked back to my original post. The TV news, of course, did not. Despite the fact that the reporter had to call me up and get me to fax him a copy of the map because otherwise he couldn’t find the house!
I did find it irritating, actually. One of the things I like about the blogosphere is that citation is so much a part of the culture. I hadn’t realized how much I liked this aspect of blogging until I wrote a story that made it into the mainstream media.
I don’t expect a print newspaper article to provide me with the story of the story, but since everything goes online today, there’s absolutely no reason they can’t provide a hat tip at the end of the online version of the story, the way bloggers do.
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If you want to buy a house, you will have to get the mortgage loans. Moreover, my mother commonly uses a college loan, which is really rapid.
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