Newspaper Plagiarism - Does Anyone Care Anymore?

Avoiding Plagiarism: What Do I Need to Cite?

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Are newspaper writers losing their integrity? It seems that back in the day there was always a certain code of ethics among journalists. They say an investigative reporter will sell his own children to get a story, but he won't steal someone else's words when he writes it. The writers of years past may have operated that way, but with the availability of internet stories and quotes now that has all changed. What you read online and in newspapers today could very likely be a rewrite of someone else's material, if not an outright copy and paste.

Newspaper plagiarism is a common practice today, especially for national and international stories. A writer in San Francisco can read a story in New York at 3:00 AM (EST) and have it ready to go in his own paper for the Midnight (PST) deadline. If he writes carefully and only plagiarizes the quotes, he might just get away with it and keep his job. The story won't be Pulitzer material, but who cares? The deadline will be met, the story will get published, and no one will be the wiser for it, right?

Society has reached a point where the distribution of information is becoming far more important than the quality. If you can repost something multiple times on Facebook, why not plagiarize a few articles? In the days before the web there were editors who cared about that type of thing, but now it seems like everything is duplicate content. Just getting it out there is all that matters. It's sad, but unfortunately that's the way many publications do business now.

There is a bright spot, though. It's almost a Catch-22 for newspaper reporters. If you plagiarize an article and send it to print and only print you might get away with it. If your newspaper publishes that story online, you're going to get caught. Duplicate content is flagged by search engines and penalized by lowering the page rank of the site displaying it. Any newspaper with an online option is tracking page rank, so continuous penalties will be noticed. To avoid them altogether, editors are now starting to use online software that checks for duplication. Even the smallest reproductions are sent back for rewrite, forcing reporters to once again do their own writing.

If you read science fiction, you'll notice disturbing similarities in older works that accurately portray the beliefs and behaviors of our modern society. In Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, there is a brief story about the search for the origin of humanity. An "archeologist" from the decaying empire tells of how he studied the works of others who visited different "origin" worlds and came to a conclusion based on their writings. When asked why he didn't just visit the sites explored himself, he was horrified. "The work has already been done by others," he exclaims. "Why would I do it again?" The empire fell soon after that. Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned there by journalists and writers who plagiarize.

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