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What Is Plagiarism, Really?

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Star-Telegram Resignation Renews Discussion

A day after the disclosure that television critic Ken Parish Perkins resigned over plagiarism charges at Texas’ Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Executive Editor Jim Witt said Perkins would not be immediately replaced; the Dallas-Fort Worth Association of Black Communicators said it might train members in how to avoid such problems and an ethics expert warned that there is “not one silver bullet” to resolving plagiarism issues.

As reported last night, Perkins resigned from the paper after, as Witt put it in a staff e-mail, “A caller to the paper last week pointed out that one paragraph in Perkins’ story Nov. 10th about the ABC series ‘Lost’ was repeated verbatim from Entertainment Weekly with no attribution.

“A further check of Perkins’ stories and columns from the present to July 2003 revealed several instances where Perkins either used a whole sentence or long phrases in sentences verbatim without giving credit or attribution, a violation of the Star-Telegram’s ethics policy,” Witt wrote.

“It was not even close,” Witt told Journal-isms today, speaking of whether Perkins had crossed the ethical line. He said the paper’s ethics guide talks about what is and what isn’t plagiarism, but conceded there was a gray area when the discussion is about only three, four or five words. “My advice is to always attribute it,” Witt said. He said that five people in the last 15 years at his paper had lost their jobs over plagiarism.

Perkins did not respond to telephone calls, but Witt said the critic “didn’t have much of an explanation” when confronted. A colleague in the Star-Telegram features department, interim Travel Editor Cary Darling, said that he understood from a staff briefing by Witt that Perkins said his use of other people’s words was “sort of unconscious.”

There may be something to that, said Aly Colón, reporting, writing and editing group leader and diversity program director at the Poynter Institute, and formerly the school’s ethics group leader.

“I do think people can almost absent-mindedly aggregate material. When the material becomes ingested into our minds, it becomes ours,” Colón said. “Then the challenge becomes, how can we separate what’s truly ours? If we were strict about this, all of us commit plagiarism constantly.”

One way to make the separation, Colón told Journal-isms, is for writers to go over what they have written, as they do for spelling and grammar, and check for what is original and what is not.

Plagiarism should be thought of as an “environmental” issue, Colón said. “The persistence of this act of stealing – that’s what it is – has as much to do with what is in the environment that people work in . . . that blinds them as to what is going on.” Is the writer, for example, “in an environment where we feel the pressure to be original every time?” He also said, “It’s not the number” of words stolen that matters, “it’s the intent. The person is still accountable, but the way you handle it is different. I don’t think we can have one-size-fits-all” response. There is “not one silver bullet.”

In the Star-Telegram features department, Darling said he had received “no specific training” on plagiarism. “Every time things happen, you’re told to be more careful,” he said.

L. Lamor Williams, a Star-Telegram reporter who is president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Association of Black Communicators, told Journal-isms his association was “thinking about having some sort of training or discussion that will help people avoid this. It’s such a shock and a disappointment.”

Witt said he would have more to say Monday.

Michael Harvey, a professor at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., and author of “The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing,” discusses academic plagiarism on his Web site and offers tips that can be adapted to journalism. Eric Deggans, president of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists, summarizes them at the end of this posting.

Witt said Perkins would not immediately be replaced because of a Knight Ridder hiring freeze. When the freeze is lifted, “we will go out and find the best TV critic we can find,” he said. Perkins had been one of only four African American television critics at U.S. daily newspapers. The mood in the Fort Worth newsroom was “subdued” today, the editor said. “People who knew and admired him are heartsick about this.”

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Knight Ridder Alums Consider Running Slate

“A review of past news reports offers up a startling number: more than 1,900 jobs have been cut from major and mid-sized newspapers over the past year. That figure does not include cuts at many smaller papers that don’t often garner the same headlines,” Editor & Publisher reported today.

Meanwhile, “In an extraordinary ‘Open Letter from Knight Ridder Alumni’ circulated to the media this morning, a long list of journalists declared, ‘We have watched mostly in silent dismay as short-term profit demands have diminished long-term capacity of newsrooms in Knight Ridder and other public media companies. We are silent no more. We will support and counsel only corporate leadership that restores to Knight Ridder newspapers the resources to do excellent journalism. We are prepared collectively to nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board. We wish to reassert John Knight’s creed,'” E&P also reported today.

“The signers include such well-known figures as Doug Clifton, Gene Roberts, Buzz Bizzinger, Mark Bowden, Philip Meyer, David Lawrence Jr., and Bill Marimow, among many others. The letter was mailed to the media by Jim Naughton, former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and former president of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.”

Also on the list are Lorraine E. Branham, director of the University of Texas School of Journalism, and former editor of the Tallahassee Democrat; Albert E. Fitzpatrick, retired assistant vice president for minority affairs of Knight Ridder, 1985-87 president of the National Association of Black Journalists and former executive editor of Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal; and Simon K.C. Li, formerly an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and now assistant managing editor of the Los Angeles Times.

E&P’s Joe Strupp reported later in the day, “Knight Ridder spokesman Polk Laffoon tells E&P that a large group of company ‘alumni’, who, concerned about journalistic quality, announced today that they may run a slate of candidates for the board of directors, has no chance of gaining control.”

Strupp went on, “Naughton added that the alumni group would likely nominate a board slate to run at the next Knight Ridder annual meeting in April. ‘And it will include journalists,’ he said. A former shareholder, Naughton said he planned to buy company stock again and believes many of the co-signers of the letter will as well.”

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Would Some Be Marched Out of Newsrooms?

In the middle of a Washington Post internal electronic discussion Wednesday that included opinions on the Bob Woodward imbroglio, portions of which were leaked to the media blog FishBowl DC, Darryl Fears injected this:

“Last word, because I can’t resist: If Judith Miller were black, I believe minority staff writers all over the country would have been forced marched out of newsrooms in a Trail of Tears. I’ll never forget some of the comments from white journalists during the Jayson Blair scandal. Turns out that miscues by white people have been arguably worse, before and after Blair’s fiasco. But there’s no mention of gender or race. Why? Because it’s absurd.”

Fears, a black journalist who covers race relations for the national news desk, gave permission for his words to be made public here.

As nearly everyone knows, Woodward, star reporter, author and Post assistant managing editor, apologized to the newspaper “for failing to reveal for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of who disclosed her identity mushroomed into a national scandal,” as Howard Kurtz reported Thursday in the Post.

Many will remember that during the scandal of 2003, in which Blair resigned from the New York Times after fabricating news stories, Blair’s race became an issue. Kurtz, on his television show “Reliable Sources,” was one of the first to ask publicly whether Blair’s “lenient” treatment was due to a racial double standard. Kurtz acknowledged then that he had “taken some flak from black reporters” and wrote that, “It’s sad that some critics are using this fiasco to discredit the efforts that have brought some badly needed color into the nation’s white-dominated newsrooms.”

The National Association of Black Journalists gave an annual Thumbs Down award in 2004 not only to Blair, but to “those pundits who sought to link his downfall to race and affirmative action.” (This columnist is mentioned in the news release.)

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Demotions Prompt Boycott of Station’s Advertisers

“Speaking on behalf of a coalition of community leaders, the Rev. William Lawson on Thursday called on KPRC-TV to restore anchors Linda Lorelle and Khambrel Marshall to their original on-air positions and asked that viewers and advertisers boycott the station,” Mike McDaniel reported today in the Houston Chronicle.

“‘We are encouraging viewers not to patronize businesses that advertise on Channel 2,’ said Lawson. Though the roles of Lorelle and Marshall were specifically mentioned, Lawson said he hopes the boycott also will make KPRC management aware that ‘we’re interested in better programming, better staffing, better managing and their being part of the economic development of the community.’

“Lawson was joined by a dozen supporters, including Serbino Sandifer-Walker, president of the Houston Association of Black Journalists; Sylvia Brooks, president of the Houston Area Urban League; Johnny Mata and Mary Ramos of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Roy Marsh of Everyones Internet.

“Channel 2 general manager Jim Joslyn said Thursday that a meeting with Quanell X and 35 leaders in the African-American community will be held Wednesday.

“‘I need to really get in touch with that community,’ he said. ‘The same thing will take place in the Hispanic community here. We have not done a good job with this. I don’t think most TV stations do. But we will get in that community. . . . I want to be part of it.'”

The Chronicle reported Thursday, “In September, Lorelle moved from anchor at 5 and 6 p.m. to anchor at noon and 4 p.m. From 1989 to 2003 she anchored Channel 2’s 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts.

“In October, Marshall became a weekend anchor after serving as anchor of Channel 2’s morning and 4 p.m. newscasts. He joined the station in May 1999 following 13 years in the Miami TV market.”

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Politician Wins Libel Award Against Black Paper

“Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price has been awarded an $852,000 judgment in a libel suit he filed against Elite News, a weekly newspaper that largely caters to the black congregations in Dallas,” James M. O’Neill reported today in the Dallas Morning News.

“Jordan Blair, Elite’s publisher, said Thursday that the company will appeal the ruling.

Price filed the suit last summer during his successful re-election campaign, the story said. The company fired its initial attorney, Phillip Layer, who “said most of Elite’s stories were merely repeating information about Mr. Price that had already been published elsewhere and noted that Mr. Price had never filed libel suits against other publications,” O’Neill wrote.

In one editorial, Darryl Blair, the Elite News publisher’s brother, wrote that Price was one of two black politicians in Dallas “whose incompetence has wrecked the spirit of inclusion for black folks in politics.”

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Indian Leader Vine Deloria Challenged Orthodoxy

Vine Deloria Jr., the Native writer and leader who died Sunday at 72, “constantly challenged orthodoxy both within Indian Country and without,” Mark Trahant, editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote as journalists continued to pay tribute.

“In the 1995 book ‘Red Earth, White Lies,’ Deloria questioned scientific theories about the migration of native people across the Bering Strait, making the case that Indian oral tradition had valuable information (if only those scientists could pay attention).

“There are two traits I really like when I read Deloria’s books. First, there is his sharp sense of humor because it transcends outrage (or perhaps it is a companion). . . . Most of all, I am drawn to Deloria’s sense of a future for American Indians. This is what jumped off the pages for me when I read his first book,” wrote Trahant, who is also board chairman at the Maynard Institute and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe in Idaho, for Sunday’s paper.

Funeral services were to take place today in Golden, Colo., with a celebration of Deloria’s life also scheduled in Rapid City, S.D.

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Short Takes:

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Ways You Can Wind Up Plagiarizing Inadvertently

Eric Deggans, president of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists, has summarized eight “Ways You Can Wind Up Plagiarizing Inadvertently,” as presented by Michael Harvey, professor at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., as well as from a regional conference of the National Association of Black Journalists:

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