Newsweek, Slate and Washington Post acknowledge Zakaria’s failure to attribute

CNN and Time are the remaining holdouts in failing to acknowledge Fareed Zakaria’s frequent plagiarism (though they don’t use the p-word).

Newsweek and Slate have added editors’ notes to Zakaria columns saying they did not meet the publications’ standards of attribution. And Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who once called plagiarism allegations by Our Bad Media reckless, told Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon Monday that five Zakaria articles “strike me as problematic in their absence of full attribution.”

Our Bad Media originally accused Zakaria in August of extensive plagiarism, beyond the incident he was suspended for in 2012, in his work for CNN, the Post and Time. In subsequent posts the bloggers identified only as @blippoblappo and @crushingbort expanded on their allegations, including instances of plagiarism by Zakaria since 2012 and in Newsweek, Slate and other publication.

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Fareed Zakaria’s plagiarism wasn’t ‘low-level;’ no one’s is

Journalism has no such sin as low-level plagiarism.

The very act of rewriting stolen material makes a theft more sinister and deliberate than the stupid plagiarists who steal whole paragraphs, passages or stories verbatim.

Plagiarism accusations against Fareed Zakaria continue, and Poynter’s Kelly McBride evaluated them for Politico and concluded: “It’s plagiarism. Low-level. But plagiarism.”

Kelly is a longtime friend and one of the strongest and wisest voices on journalism ethics. Several years ago we collaborated on a series of ethics seminars and my respect for her grew each time we worked together. I have praised and promoted the ethics book she edited with Tom Rosenstiel, The New Ethics of Journalism. And I’ll invite and publish or link to any response she has to this post.

But she’s wrong to use the phrase “low-level” in describing dozens of instances of obviously deliberate theft of other people’s work. That’s not all she said. She also said, “It seems obvious that Fareed was overly reliant on his source material.” I agree with that, but it’s a huge understatement. He was overly reliant on his source material, without attribution.

Here’s how we defined plagiarism in Telling the Truth and Nothing But, a book on which I collaborated with journalists from more than 30 journalism organizations, media companies and universities:

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I ‘lost’ a newsroom once, too

Jill Abramson, photo linked from New York Times

Because I was attending the International Journalism Festival when Dylan Byers published his click-bait piece “Jill Abramson loses the newsroom” on Politico, I initially intended to respond just with disapproving tweets.

Then Emily Bell slammed the piece for its sexist tone better than I could have. And I initially thought I’d respond just with approving tweets.

After all, I don’t know Jill Abramson. And she doesn’t need me to defend her (great response from her, cited in Huffington Post). I had no idea whether the story was true or not, though I had serious doubts because it relied heavily on unnamed and unaccountable sources. But as I considered it, I thought that a male voice, a former editor who might have supposedly “lost” a newsroom, might have some value and I started pondering a post.

Then I heard Aron Pilhofer tell an Abramson story at the festival and I decided I’d better blog about this.

Most of the editors I’ve worked for have been men. That’s probably true of most people in the news business because the vast majority of editors are men. While women have made strides, men still dominate in newsroom leadership.

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Entrepreneurial journalists should pursue several revenue streams

Entrepreneurial journalists make a mistake if they think advertising is their only potential revenue stream.

Our entrepreneurial journalism class at Georgetown University will focus tonight on exploring possible ways to make money beyond display advertising. I doubt that many organizations would want to pursue all these possibilities. Particularly if you’re a small organization or an individual, you will need to pick your shots carefully and decide which have the most potential and which are worth the time and money it would cost to try them. Some of these opportunities are tailored for the sole proprietor. Others work better for a larger organization or at least for an entrepreneur or team with specialized technical skills.

Here are some revenue streams we will discuss in class:

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Five reasons government shouldn’t subsidize journalism

If you are interested in this, check out Five more reasons government shouldn’t subsidize journalism, responding to another piece by McChesney and Nichols.

This madness has to stop. Intelligent people have to stop thinking that government funding is the solution to the economic challenges facing newspapers.

I love newspapers. I hope they survive and thrive (again) for the rest of my life and beyond. If that delivery system fails, I hope healthy new business and journalism models emerge and stabilize to continue the important roles that newspapers have played for their communities and the nation: informing us of the news and playing the watchdog role on government and other powerful institutions.

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Seven reasons charging for content won’t work

I hope the newspaper tycoons meeting secretly in Chicago this week come up with a clap-your-hands plan.

Because clapping our hands to save the newspaper industry, like we saved Tinkerbell at the movies when we were children, has more chance of succeeding than the paid-content-cartel approach that newspaper executives are dreaming and talking about but being careful not to conspire about.

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