According to Muller, repurposing and synergy are buzzword baddies, and yes, as Muller describes, people often use terminology to promote unspoken agendas.  But, Muller speaks about repurposing in a way that confuses the issue further, and in my opinion, risks giving editors a reason to avoid making changes in the newsroom that are conducive to new media, including visual journalism.  

In her commentary, Muller laments the case of a website that allegedly used the original investigative reporting of News21 without attribution.  In her post, Muller describes News21 as a student-run reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation. (Muller, an associate professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication, also states that she was involved with the project.)

Muller writes: “My students were stunned to learn that their story had suddenly appeared on another Internet site, along with a photo of a teenager holding a gun – NOT a teenager from their story. The words had been changed around, but all the content was clearly based on News21’s original reporting, without attribution (except for a quote credited to the L.A. Weekly.)”  

In her posting, Muller chooses to omit the name of the website that appropriated her students’ material, so I can’t judge for myself, but as described, I agree it sounds dishonest and lazy.  The thing I don’t get is since when is this an incident of repurposing?  And, if Muller isn’t clear about the meaning of the terms she uses, how many other editors aren’t either?  

New media, including visual journalism, depends on new processes of production.  It requires a bringing together of several elements that were previously created in isolation.  Repurposing, similarly to convergence and synergy, is a term that I understand to represent one way this can be done, depending on several factors.  To repurpose or not is an issue of process, not ethics, and a debate of its merits is only useful to editors when made on these terms.

Muller writes: “The problem with repurposing is that Internet journalism is the new Wild West, where a few outlaws think it’s just fine to grab original material and post it as their own. Where I come from, that’s known as plagiarism.”

Muller is right. That is plagiarism, be it on the Internet or in print, and only through pointing this out will conduct change.  However, demonizing a term such as repurposing only serves to make it more difficult for the industry to come to grips with new media formats and technology.