Results matching “editor in plagiarism row”

The Russian Communications and Press Ministry has drafted legislation that will extend copyright protection to include the news, thus giving news agencies greater abilities to claim plagiarism of their information property. If the bill passes into legislation, media bodies using content without sufficiently citing the source, will do so at the risk of being fined or having publications confiscated, the Moscow Times reports.

Ultimately, the measures would create a legal framework for the commercialisation of information by news agencies, explains Vadim Uskov, a copyright lawyer. The current problem is that information is not legally considered as "an object of buying and selling" thus a present "there is a real market, but there is no law to regulate it".

Roy Greenslade has been running a series of articles in The Guardian based on email exchanges with unnamed sources within the Daily Telegraph. A recent email that he received and writes about in his column today alleges that plagiarism is rife at the respected British newspaper.

Greenslade quotes directly from the email, which states: "You do realise, don't you, that stuff is being lifted with hardly a word changed from the Mail website and the Metro?"

The email goes onto say: "No one is going to pay the least bit of attention to a media organisation that recirculates other people's stuff, and thus the name, the brand and the reputation are constantly undermined from within. One can even imagine a situation a few years hence when the Telegraph is no more than a news aggregator website doing no journalism of its own."

These allegations are surprising, especially considering the Telegraph's reputations as one of the most respected newspapers in the UK market. However, one does have to consider that a large number of staff at the Telegraph are unhappy with the recent increase in working hours at the newspaper, so perhaps this anonymous source is simply a disgruntled employee venting?

Source: Guardian.co.uk

See also:

UK: Editor-In-Chief of the Daily Telegraph lifts the lid on his newsroom

Vadim Gorshenin, chief editor of Pravda.ru, said that he intends to sue the news outlet NewsLand.ru, which functions by "stealing" content from other publications.

Not only does NewsLand.ru ignore the copyright policies of news outlets but it also fails to cite the sources and authors, reported gipp.ru. The site has a separate section beside the published articles where there is a link to the "original article".

Gorshenin contacted the outlet and asked them to stop re-publishing content from Pravda.ru and any other of its resources. The response he got was that NewsLand.ru gives its readers the right to have access to any online publication and that its social network is of a news nature.

The outlet also takes material from Webplaneta and up until spring this year, it was present on the portal Yandex News, meaning that a lot of Yandex users read plagiarized articles.

Source: gipp.ru

The Web has entirely changed the journalist-reader relationship. Two-way reader interaction is gaining ground through email, comments, SMS, online chats and blog posts, 24/7. This would imply that news outlets increasingly need ombudsmen. Yet there are reportedly fewer than 40 ombudsmen in the US, and few papers are willing to hire one, at a time of general cost-cutting. Maybe they should think about the potential costs of not having an ombudsman, and figure that the readers’ editor is not (only) a guardrail against angry readers. He or she is a bridge into Web 2.0 journalism.

The Los Angeles Times traces back the evolution of newspapers’ view of bloggers. In the past, they “wanted nothing to do with bloggers,” but now newspapers “are posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue.”

The Boston Globe suspended for two months a veteran sports reporter after he allegedly plagiarized a portion of a football column. He used a common source for sportswriters – tolerated – but rewrote words that weren’t his own.

Malaysian newspaper the New Straights Times announced Wednesday that journalist and editor Brendan Pereira will step down at the end of the year after receiving plagiarism accusations according to BBC News. According to Pereira the date of his departure was decided two weeks before the article's publication. Pereira is thought to have copied American journalist Mitch Albom’s column  "Remembering the Day before the Day” with his story "How Dearly We Miss June the Sixth."

With all this talk about ethical lapses in photojournalism, one thing is clear: it is easier to pledge yourself to a value system than it is to live by one, especially in a fiercely competitive, mercurial industry.  Such is the environment facing the code of ethics proposed by the US-based Society for News Design (SND) earlier this year.  For, although commendable, I can’t help wondering how it is going to trickle down to the newspapers and websites who need it most.

 

The much-publicized story of Harvard sophomore and supposed novelist phenom Kaavya Viswanathan has turned towards the news. Several scandals over the past few years have broken the public's confidence in large news organizations to supply it with trustworthy hard facts and analysis. One journalist for New York Magazine takes his readers to an extreme to find out how can one really be sure what they're reading is unique.

There have been many discussions about the contradiction between the huge profits that media giants demand and their newsrooms' role of producing quality journalism. Journalists feel that their publications, and their communities, are suffering greatly because of newsroom staff cuts which their corporate benefactors deem necessary in order to increase revenues as much of their audience and advertising migrates to new media, especially the Internet.

The Internet also furnishes a platform for journalism, but it has not yet been determined if it will be able to provide society with the kind of reporting it needs to remain informed.

In this respect, journalism is caught in a tug-of-war whose opposing sides are the old guard, which is seemingly cannibalizing it, and new media, which isn't quite yet sure how to embrace it. Depending on which side wins, either a brand new news model will emerge or journalism will be torn apart in the fight?

According to Sun-Sentinel : "Lloyd Brown, the editorial page editor of The Florida Times-Union retired after a committee found three instances of plagiarism and other times when material was not properly attributed on the editorial pages, publisher Carl Cannon announced in Tuesday editions. "In my view, the critical element of the issue is intent,'' Brown said. "At no time have we ever attempted to pass off someone else's work as our own. If other material was used without proper attribution, it was inadvertent. Regardless, because of the issue, I cannot continue to be an effective voice for the editorial board of The Florida Times-Union, and I have told publisher Carl Cannon that I would like to retire as soon as possible.'' Brown, who worked for the Times-Union for 42 years, was responsible for about 12,000 editorials and oversight of letters to the editor and the op-ed page."

Source: Sun-Sentinel. com, Associated Press through IFRA

Just posted on Hans Kullin's weblog: "Here is a brilliant example, maybe the most ambitious, of blogs as media watchdogs in Sweden so far... Stockholm Spectator accuses Dagens Nyheter of plagiarism and claim that a reporter has copied at least four articles from the New York Times without giving the original author or the paper any credit. The full story here is quite interesting and contains correspondence between The Spectator and the editor of DN Kultur. The story is now spreading across the blogosphere and it doesn't seem that DN are willing to do a media culpa, which leads me to believe that we haven't heard the end of it yet." To be continued.

Sources: Media Culpa and Stockholm Spectator

Here, in totality, is an important and creative piece about media ethics and black Africa written by Claude-Jean Bertrand, the editor of presscouncils.org. It reminds us all that our responsibility toward journalistic ethics extends past recent plagiarism and fabrication scandals, and proposes a sort of "adopt-a-newspaper" program between newspapers in the developed world and in Africa: "On Press Freedom Day (May 10), economist Amartya Sen repeated that there are no famines in democracies with press freedom. May I add no genocides either and few civil wars or mass epidemics ? News media in emerging democracies can help avoid such disasters. And news media in established democracies should help their less fortunate brethren...