Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2010 > October > 11 > Entry
Entertainment Journalism Class 6: Plagiarism and Transparency
This week’s educational post was originally dedicated to the short-form review. Many students in the Entertainment Journalism class at St. Edward’s University have learned to master observation, description, analysis, interpretation and evaluation in a review format of less than 500 words. One can sample work here.
Next week, we’ll go into the short-form review more detail. The issues of plagiarism and transparency, however, have reared their ugly heads in the interim.
Plagiarism is claiming the intellectual product of others as your original work. Transparency makes it easy for readers to identify sources, and thereby evaluate reporting on their own.
Perhaps because a month of micro-blogging has focused on links, updates and rehashes of previously reported entertainment news, the practice leaked into the more traditional world of blogging.
This week, more than one student cut text from the Web and pasted it into their blogs without the use of quotation marks or clear, up-front sourcing.
I’m aware of the excuse that this may happen at times because of sloppy or hurried reporting and writing. The class requires daily posts and commentary, as well as Twitter and Facebook updates. But with several students, the practice of cutting and pasting cropped up fairly consistently.
This is wrong. This is stealing.
What if the students were cutting and pasting from their own previous work on the Web? If so, they are plagiarizing themselves, presenting as original work that which has already been edited and published. And they are not identifying the sources of the prose.
But wait, you say, what about the sequence of reporting the same news or opinions through tweets, Facebook posts, blogs and then in print? That’s something I and other reporters do all the time.
We record the immediate impressions on Gowalla or Twitter, add a twist, usually personal, later on Facebook, then turn those snippets into acceptable prose on our blogs, before or expanding those sketches into articles or columns for a print edition.
That is an acceptable sequence for reporters today and we regularly share that process with readers for the sake of transparency.
We have only two hard and fast rules in Entertainment Journalism class: Write every day. Talk every week.
Cutting and pasting is not writing. It is not original work. Several students just learned that. Or so I hope.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Education
Comments
When commenting, we ask that you keep things civil and abide by our Visitor Agreement. To report comment abuse, click here.