Abstract
About 30 years ago, while at a provincial news agency, I complained that a national newspaper paid less for page leads than its rivals – £110 compared with £120. The newspaper responded by upping payments to £125. Today, the same type of story will get much the same type of payment. Some, incredibly, pay even less. A journalist might get £150 from one newspaper, or as little as £110. Freelances may grumble to newsdesks, but blame lies higher up the chain of command with those who see journalism as a commodity, like sausages on a production line.
One consequence of this is an explosion of casual plagiarism that now plagues the industry. Any newsdesk that denies it is either delusional or dumb. It is there, hidden in text like horsemeat in a supermarket lasagne. Everyone is tainted, whether they admit it or not. I asked one tabloid news editor recently why he accepted stories obviously cut-and-pasted from another's website, and he replied: “Well, what do you expect for what we pay them?”
Plagiarism itself is hardly new. Many otherwise good journalists may, under pressure, have filched a fact or copied a quote. I have. It was reprehensible, but you kidded yourself it was a lesser evil than being behind the competition or on the receiving end of a newsdesk bollocking. Today though, it is widespread – rarely challenged by desks and common practice for new journalists who don't seem to know better. Once an occasional lapse, plagiarism is now the done thing.
To try and find out why, I spoke with scores of local and national journalists across Britain: staffers and freelancers, old hands and rookies, executive editors and retired hacks. The subject was “text re-use” rather than the more judgmental plagiarism, but nobody suggested they did not know what I was talking about. As a working definition of plagiarism, I took “the copying of stories from one media organisation for reuse by another without verification or the acknowledgement of, permission from, or payment to its original author”. The research took three months and three factors emerged as providing the conditions for an epidemic of plagiarism: technology made it easy; commercial pressures prized profit over quality of content; a changing newsroom culture allowed previously delinquent practices to thrive.
It used to be thought that “churnalism” was a great threat to journalistic standards. Huge portions of news pages were – and still are – filled with recycled press releases or agency copy. But there is also a huge appetite for plagiarised material, often cut from one website and pasted on another. Rapacious concentration of ownership, skeletal editorial staffs and pressures on fewer journalists to produce more stories for more platforms have created a perfect storm. Under-resourced reporters have for too long sat chained to their computers like battery hens, yet profits among the newly converged groups were typically 25–35 per cent up between 2007 and 2008. This focus on profit over quality produced a desperate reliance on quick-and-easy copy.
Yet this spread of plagiarism is largely unacknowledged and continues to stuff Britain's national media with unchecked stories, whose facts may well have been verified only by the original author – who could easily have been a junior on a small circulation weekly. It happens because a cut-and-paste mentality has overwhelmed the system for gathering stories, mostly from the provinces to the nationals. Sometimes there are syndication arrangements, which some think is above board but others regard as trying to legitimise plagiarism. At other times it seems some national reporters are harvesting copy from other websites, or an intermediary freelance is selling harvested copy on to them.
The owner of a well-established freelance agency said they could not compete when, within 20 minutes of his local paper hitting the web, the copy – word for word – appears online on a national's website. Hardly enough time for a rewrite, let alone checks. One former online editor of a national newspaper told me his site devoured huge volumes of plagiarised copy, hoping to attract news aggregators such as the Huffington Post and The Drudge Report to trigger lucrative spikes in page views. He said: “It's carpet bombing basically. They throw up any old shit. They're in a race to throw up as much content as quickly as they can. That's why online throws up stuff that they wouldn't put in the paper in a million years.”
Plagiarism has always gone on, but never on an industrial scale like this. A retired national journalist who began in the days of hot metal but was still working when the age of the internet arrived told me: “They shed staff and thought technology could make up the gap. But instead of doing one story a day well it was three stories done badly.” An editor-in-chief of a large regional newspaper group despaired: “The accountants have taken over and everything is driven by margin and irrespective of the cost of editorial quality. My budget has been reduced and reduced and reduced. It's simply about the bottom line …”
One journalist who studied ethics at university admitted “unlearning” everything within a week of joining his first national. His first job was to copy stories from other newspapers. “It was like a conveyor belt,” he said. “You don't ask questions about it, you just do it. You're being given it by someone far superior than you, far higher up the food chain … they know better than you, so you trust them.” And there may be the key to a solution. If enough people sanction it either by what they do or by what they fail to do, bad practice will prevail. The higher up the food chain an ethical framework is set, the more likely it is to affect behaviour. Responsibility for reform rests at the top.