The premier plagiarist of 2012 delivered a sort-of apology to a Knight Foundation luncheon Tuesday and, in a nice touch, his hosts projected a live feed of Twitter reaction as he spoke. Soon, however, Poynter's Andrew Beaujon reported that Knight paid Lehrer $20,000 for his mea whatever. More from Paul Raeburn, Daniel Engber, and Curtis Brainard.
Journalism news
The Retraction Watch blog made its name by shining light on scientific papers pulled for misrepresentation, misconduct, malpractice, or other chicanery. This week, however, the blog was notified that 10 of its posts were pulled by its web host because an Indian web site claimed copyright to them. Not true, said RW's Ivan Oransky. More from John Timmer and Tom Levenson, plus five similar episodes.
No word on whether Jonah Lehrer will attend (we're guessing not), but the American Copy Editors Society is organizing the National Summit on Plagiarism and Fabrication this April in St. Louis. Meanwhile, the ACES home page offers two recent posts on how copyeditors can help stop plagiarized and fabricated stories from being published. Also, John McIntyre on how copyediting is like parenting a teen.
Thomas Hayden marks the once-popular newsmagazine's demise with a look back at its science reporting, which he says looms larger in memory than it did in life: "Newsweek, along with Time and US News & World Report, used to be nearly ubiquitous. They had impact that’s hard to imagine with today’s fractured and distracted audiences — and yes, I realize I’m sounding really old right now. But they also kept a lot of voices and stories out of the conversation."
A much-discussed report from Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism says "the gathering and dissemination of facts, and even of basic analysis, is being automated," but that journalists can "swing more of their resources to the kind of investigative and interpretive work that only humans, not algorithms, can do." More from Nieman Lab, Poynter, Alan Mutter, and CJR.
Sara Morrison writes in Columbia Journalism Review about the inaugural offering of Kickstarter-funded Matter, a pay-per-view (at 99 cents) site dedicated to longform science journalism. Its first story, by Anil Ananthaswamy, is about a man with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a condition that causes people to want to amputate otherwise healthy limbs. More from Poynter, and Michael Meyer in CJR on the longform market.
Actually, the problem is not as much plagiarism as unoriginality, Kelly McBride writes at Poynter. A reporter can't be blamed for starting with a Google search, but that creates risks: "These days, we must see always what others have written before we begin – and there’s so much that’s been written about any given topic because writing now is mostly the continuation of a conversation already in play." Also, Mathew Ingram on the Wente case.
You'd think the best authority on a book's inspiration would be its author. At least that's what Philip Roth thought. As Andrew Lih recounts in Online Journalism Review, Roth wrote in the New Yorker about his struggle to fix an incorrect Wikipedia passage about his book, The Human Stain: "That someone's first-hand knowledge about their own work could be rejected in this manner seems inane. But it's a fundamental working process of Wikipedia."
Journalism's latest embarrassment has lost another outlet. Wired.com cut ties with Jonah Lehrer after commissioning a review of his work by science writer and journalism professor Charles Seife. Among his conclusions: "Lehrer has been recycling his material for years; he was doing it in 2008 and probably even earlier. It's amazing — and disturbing — that it took so long for anyone to notice." More from Poynter.
It was certainly a reach when the conservative National Review drew a link in a blog post between Penn State scientist Michael Mann and the school's disgraced former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Now, CJR's Curtis Brainard writes that Mann is demanding a full retraction and apology: "More often than not ... it is conservative/libertarian writers harassing climate scientists, and the low to which [writers] Simberg and Steyn stooped is certainly deplorable."