Somewhere along the way of my career, there was told a tale of an irascible old newspaper reporter renowned for crafting pitch-perfect leads, or opening paragraphs of a news story, that would all too often be followed by the instruction to editors back in the newsroom: “pick up wires here.”
As far as the readers would know, the entire story was the fruit of his creative labors. Everyone else editors, sources, competitors and the wire service reporters who had provided the bulk of the reporting published under his byline would know it wasn’t.
But he could get away with it with a wink and a nod because that was the culture of journalism of that day. Thankfully, cultures change.
By the late 20th century, journalism standards had evolved to where most editors felt obliged to tack a little agate line onto a story acknowledging that some information had come from a source other than the reporter whose name was atop it: “With wire reports” or “The Associated Press contributed reporting” or somesuch.
Well, even that isn’t enough anymore.
With the rise of the Internet and several scorching scandals over integrity, journalists must realize that old practices like “lifting” passages, quotations or nuggets of information from other published work with only vague (or no) credit are simply no longer acceptable, not to mention too easy to detect.
Reporters and editors at Stars and Stripes were reminded of that the hard way in the past week.
Last Thursday night, Pentagon reporter Jeff Schogol wrote a draft of a bylined piece that on Friday was updated and expanded by an editor and that on Saturday was published under the headline “4,000 soldiers will be advisers in Afghanistan.”
The editor in the Washington office, doing what editors do, had been keeping tabs on what other news outlets were reporting Friday morning. Two paragraphs in an early Washington Post account written by Karen DeYoung caught his eye. He copied them, inserted them unchanged into Schogol’s copy and then added a small-type tagline that read “The Washington Post contributed to this report.”
The paragraphs said: “In a sign of the new importance the administration is placing on the mission, a brigade of the Army’s vaunted 82nd Airborne Division is being broken up into 10-to-14-member advisory teams, a Pentagon official said. Until now, the military has relied heavily on inexperienced National Guardsmen to fill out the teams.
“The change couldn’t be more dramatic,’ said retired Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan defense think tank. The 82nd Airborne Division is the nation’s shock force.’”
Moreover, when Schogol’s piece was posted on Stripes.com, the “contributed” tagline vanished into the ether.
I got an inkling that something was amiss Saturday afternoon, when into my mailbox popped a scathing note from an Army civilian in Georgia who works with returning guardsmen. The gratuitous phrase “inexperienced National Guardsmen” had infuriated him and, I would come to learn, numerous guardsmen around the world.
In a wave of angry e-mail, they noted rightly that guardsmen have long been serving with distinction in Iraq and Afghanistan and well before that in a host of other hazardous assignments that were not or could not be fully staffed by regular forces.
Schogol did not answer my e-mailed inquiry, but the editor of his story did, explaining in detail what had happened and accepting full responsibility for a “really dumb” lapse.
I expect everyone at Stripes will learn from this episode, which began with the best of intentions to bolster a news report and to credit a secondary source.
Still, a passage was lifted verbatim from the work of a reporter at another news organization and used in a bylined Stripes article without any indication of where those particular words or information had come from.
The passage contained an indirect quotation from an anonymous Washington Post source (“a Pentagon official”), a direct quotation from an outside expert (Col. Nagl) who appears to have been interviewed by the Post, and two subjective assessments that were not Schogol’s: the loaded generalization of National Guardsmen as “inexperienced” and the introductory phrase hailing the troop decision as “a sign of the new importance the administration is placing on the mission.”
Had the editor, a seasoned and valued veteran, not been rushing the story through the editing process on deadline amid several other tasks, I am sure he would have been more judicious in the handling of those paragraphs. Alas, he wasn’t.
Thus, readers were left with no clue that the anonymous source was not Schogol’s, that he had not interviewed Nagl and that he had not described seasoned combat veterans as “inexperienced National Guardsmen” or that the troop decision was a “sign” of “new importance.”
Stars and Stripes has a contractual arrangement with the Washington Post Co. to buy syndicated editorial content, which is typically published with full Post bylines and institutional credit. But the indeterminate “contributed to this report” tagline did not get the job done in this case. And that would be doubly true for material plucked from the Post’s Web site rather than from a story directly provided to Stripes by the Post.
The top editor of Stars and Stripes, Terry Leonard, told me that newsroom policy on attribution is being revised.
Here are some recommendations:
Whenever practical, provide Stripes reporters with copies of their edited stories to review before publication or posting.
Abandon the “contributed to this report” device for anything other than acknowledging modest staff contributions to an article. It’s otherwise meaningless.
Don’t cite anonymous sources from other news organizations unless there is a compelling reason and the organizations are clearly associated with those sources. Likewise with subjective statements by outside reporters. Otherwise, their mistakes or excesses become our mistakes or excesses.
Give our readers the latest and best information by continuing to mine other news outlets’ reporting, but be forthright about where information comes from. Treat any significant facts or exclusive or enterprise material garnered from other organizations the way we would any document or person we quote, and give credit in the body of the article itself: “The Washington Post reported” or so-and-so “told the Post” and so forth.
As the best editor I ever knew once told me: If we want people to credit our reporting, we must be meticulous in crediting theirs.
