An Editor’s Note:
In the Statesman’s Schools column on Wednesday’s Page B2 , the first three paragraphs of an item about school breakfasts were taken nearly verbatim from a news release by the Center for Public Policy Priorities. It is not the American-Statesman’s practice to print items from outside sources verbatim and without proper credit. We regret the error.
Though the note consciously avoids using the word, this does fall into the plagiarism category.
6 Comments
Cmon man … running a press release is plagiarism? They WANT the press release run in the paper.
Of course, you should always note that the information is “according to a press release,” which was the mistake in this case, but newspapers and magazines regularly run press releases verbatim.
I agree that press releases are written to end up in the paper, but it’s unethical to print one verbatim, or to not cite the source. If you use another person’s words and don’t credit them, it’s plagiarism. Even if it’s a press release.
As for the ethics of publishing a press release verbatim, check out this series of posts:
http://valleywag.com/tech/vendor_generated-content/
Never print a press release verbatim. At best, you become nothing but a shill for whichever corporation or marketing group sent out the press release. At worst, you can end up on the wrong side of a major lawsuit if the press release is a malicious hoax. The press release ‘announcing’ John Basedow’s death in the Boxing Day tsunami (and no, he didn’t die - he wasn’t even in the region) is just one example.
Well, there is plagiarism, then there is plagiarism. I find it odd that a newspaper would run a correction of this nature. Really, press releases are sent out by organizations who hope that that the information is published, thus permission is tacitly granted to use it. Would a paper run the phrase “according to a press release” a hundred times in a row in the community calendar section? Technically, every obit we receive from a funeral home is a press release, should we attribute those as well? If this is the new standard of plagiarism, everyone who ever rewrote a press release (including me) is now guilty.
Lots of press releases run verbatim, and they have for years.
Flacks love it when newspapers screw up that way.
But I concur, the error isn’t plagiarism; it’s failing to correctly identify the source.
Plagiarism speaks, in my mind, to whether or not the source *expected* the material to be published as much as it does to attribution.
My two bob’s worth: not plagiarism, but verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry lazy journalism.