Courant Plagiarism Accusations

(UPDATE 11/19/09: Here is an important new development: The lawyers get involved!)

The Connecticut Law Tribune makes an important observation on this story:  "For years, print publishers have complained about radio and television stations taking newspaper stories and reading them on the air."

It is standard operating procedure at many radio stations and TV stations in the morning for news anchors to open the newspaper and re-write interesting stories that the station's staff has not covered themselves.  Some broadcast outlets will credit the newspaper, some will not.  This practice goes back to the early days of radio, when announcers read newspaper articles verbatim.

It happens in part because at 4 am, there is no way you can interview anyone on most stories.  But it also happens because radio stations and TV stations have fewer reporters than newspapers (or no reporters at all, in the case of radio stations), so they were unable to dig up all the stories the newspaper did the day before.  The Hartford Courant is facing staff shortages itself now.

In his blog, a writer at the Bristol Press wonders why a Hartford Courant reporter didn't bother to call the person quoted in a Bristol Press article, but instead simply re-wrote the smaller newspaper's reporting.  I suspect because the answer is that the Courant reporter had to turn out so many stories so quickly, that there was no time to make a phone call.  This is often true in radio and television, where you may have five or six minutes to turn around a story, before writing the next story.

The TV background of some of the Courant's top managers may have made them blind to what a newspaper person would have seen as a big no-no.

Putting the articles on the Courant's web site or in the paper without attribution was plagiarism.  Copying and pasting other newspapers' articles, essentially taking their words, may have been a copyright -- BUT there does NOT seem to be any accusation that The Courant did this.  Using re-written stories with attribution to the other publication was lazy journalism, but not necessarily plagiarism.  The Courant is wrong to claim this is aggregation.  It is not.

The Courant does true aggregation on its Connecticut Breaking News site.  The real aggregation there is the list of headlines from other news outlets in the state, under the heading of "More CT News Headlines" in the right hand column, about halfway down the page.  It is just a collection of links to headlines from other newspapers, making Connecticut Breaking News into a portal, sending the readers to those websites.  This is the polite way to aggregate, because it does not take away any of the linked news outlets' clicks or ad revenue.  I think this is good aggregation.