Plagiarism at the Hartford Courant damages more than its credibility

Whatever the new model for a newspaper should be, which has been thetopic of so much esoteric discussion over the past few years bothwithin and outside the news business, rest assured the Hartford Couranthasn’t found it. Plagiarizing the work of its competitors, particularlythat of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, whose Managing Editor ChrisPowell shares his column with this newspaper, is about as bad anapproach to newsgathering as one can imagine.

Powell challenged the Courant on its “aggregation strategy,� whichincludes, apparently, lifting content directly from other copyrightedpublications and calling it their own. He wrote a letter to theCourant’s publisher making it clear that they should immediately ceasetaking copy from his newspaper and not only neglecting to credit it,but printing it with credits to Courant reporters. The Courant has nowapologized, and its publisher says that six employees are being heldresponsible for aggregating copy and neglecting to include attributionfor it, or crediting Courant reporters for it in error, and have beendisciplined.

We all make mistakes. However, this sort of activity seems as if itmust be much more the result of a general policy, an attitude withinthe culture of a publication, rather than a string of innocentmistakes. Otherwise, how could the copy have gotten past editors, copyeditors, proofreaders? If such still exist at the Courant, given themassive cutbacks there over recent years. But at the least, thereporters who were credited with the copy in error must have known theydidn’t write it. One would think they would have taken issue with thebyline they received for what they did not create.

Just one question for those at the Courant: How could you?

Your cavalier attitude toward taking others’ copy to fill inches inyour print edition has damaged not just your credibility with readersbut that of others in the same business of gathering news, even thoseof us who prefer to do it the old-fashioned way. Because while onlinelinks and sharing of content are common now, those who say they arejournalists need to know where the information they gather comes from,and they need to attribute it for their readers.

Damage is also done to readers’ trust of the print media, for goodreason. The long history of journalists fighting for the good story,even risking their lives to get the truth to the public (in Russia, bythe way, this continues to be a threat: 17 journalists have been killedthere since 2000) becomes sullied by the image of “aggregators� sittingat a computer pulling copy from other news organizations off their Websites. When that’s what has to be done to fill your newspaper, it’stime to simply cut back pages. Readers would surely rather haveoriginal material in lesser quantity than stolen material in greaterquantity.