Is it plagiarism if they want to be copied?

A story in the Guardian reports on a website called Churnalism.com which compares the text from press releases with news stories on the same topic. This text-matching exercise has shown that news organizations often copy the wording from press releases and paste it into their stories.

The phenomenon of journalists relying on press releases isn't a new one, but it is one which will presumably become more widespread as news organizations around the world respond to harsh economic realities by cutting reporting budgets.

This story (rightly) addresses the recycling of press releases as a question related to quality in journalism, but doesn't mention the p-word, and there's a sense in which it shouldn't, in which plagiarism would be a side issue in this context.  The people who write press releases would like nothing better than for newspapers to reprint them as fact, with no changes made. They don't feel their authorial rights have been infringed. The reason this strategy can be problematic is that we assume press releases are designed to tell the story in such a way as to put the issuer of the release in the most favorable light possible, while we hope the news media take a more balanced and critical view of any news event they report on.

However, if it were students instead of journalists using this strategy, the first reaction of many teachers would be to the unattributed textual relationships, and the word 'plagiarism' would be invoked.  (And, interestingly, the information about a given news story on the Churnalism site is strikingly reminiscent of a Turnitin report--percentage of the press release copied into the story, percentage of the story consisting of language from the press release, a side-by-side comparison of the two texts, etc.)

So this story interests me for what it implies about the relationship between what we teach our students, and the writing they'll do in the workplace. The principles we teach for good source use are fundamentally academic ones, but few of our students are going to be academics. They may go on to work in professional contexts where the recycling of language per se  is not always problematic, and in which the principles guiding acceptable and unacceptable intertextuality are shaped by the individual demands of the discourse community.

To what extent does our teaching about source use in the university equip students to write in their professional lives?

The aptly named (Dr?) Guttenberg

The English-language press has been a bit behind the continent in picking it up, but there's a new plagiarism scandal: the German defence minister has been charged with plagiarizing part of his PhD thesis.

While specifics are hard to come by, as they usual are in public episodes of plagiarism, it appears that it's patchwriting that's really involved.

What is striking about the response this case has generated is how very short the collective memory is.  Joseph Biden—now a heartbeat away from the US presidency—was forced to withdraw from a bid for the presidency after allegations of plagiarism in one of his speeches turned up similar allegations regarding his student work. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. appears to have patchwritten parts of his thesis in theology. Here in Sweden, a Stockholm University professor widely known here in Sweden for her political activity was the recipient of vituperous public allegations of plagiarism after having adopted a patchwriting strategy in her published work. And so on and so on and so on.

My point isn't (of course) that the frequency with which plagiarism is identified in the writings of public figures somehow makes it conventional. Rather I'm a bit surprised that the media, and their consumers, can respond with shock and outrage again and again and again.

The journalistic adage goes 'Dog bites man—no news. Man bites dog—news.'  Patchwriting in student writing should, on the evidence, fall into the former category.

New book

A volume on academic writing has just come out, with several chapters on plagiarism:

Voices, identities, negotiations, and conflicts. Writing academic English across cultures.
Ed. by Phan Le Ha and Bradley Baurain
Emerald Group Publishing

More info: http://books.emeraldinsight.com/display.ask?K=9780857247193

Plagiarism in a PhD thesis at Ohio State

A graduate of the Ohio State University (my alma mater) has not only had her degree revoked after a university disciplinary committee found her guilty of plagiarism, she has been ordered to pay $15,000 in damages to the author of the thesis she plagiarized, according to a story in the OSU student newspaper, The Lantern. The article links to court documents giving about 17 pages' worth of examples of copied chunks of text, and the filing states that these are not the only examples. Interestingly, though, it appears that the two theses were on different topics. It was therefore possible to use the same extensive passages of language to frame two separate pieces of research. I'm not sure what that tells us, but it seems to raise some interesting questions.