A NYT Lede That Duplicates Wikipedia

No part of this discussion has to do with the letter of the law. She clearly breached the New York Times' journalistic standards.

 

It's funny. The Times writer would be embarrassed to publicly credit Wikipedia as the source of her information, plus it wouldn't read as well.

But, instead of not using it, she uses it anyway, and doesn't give credit.

I bet she's more embarrassed now.

 

This is not to exonerate either her or the Times, but I bet if you began going through the work of journalists, and in particular factual background passages, this happens a lot. Maybe not Wikipedia, but some expert source material. I'm willing to bet that Carol Vogel honestly think she was plagiarizing. In fact, you can tell that she changed the words some, so she thought she was nudging it to the correct side of the line.

 

FWIW:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/142507/schmidle-defends-sourcing-in-new-yorkers-getting-bin-laden-story-while-narrative-editors-suggest-improvements/

Journalists have talked for years about how to handle attributions in narratives. Ben Montgomery, a narrative writer at Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times, said the Jayson Blair scandal forced journalists to reassess how much they should tell readers about the reporting process. Many narrative writers began to reveal more details about where they got their information — and they were recognized for doing so.

“Enrique’s Journey,” a heavily footnoted series, won the Pulitzer Prize the same year as the Blair scandal. The Pulitzer board said the story was “exhaustively reported.” Some stories that had been previously in the running for the prize but weren’t as well-sourced were criticized for not including enough attribution.

“The Pulitzer judges were saying: Prove it. Readers were saying: Prove it. And many feature writers responded by showing their cards more often, with footnotes or how-this-story-was-reported boxes or writing that revealed where the information was coming from,” Montgomery said via email. “You saw those efforts in the writing, right down to how journalists chose their words.”

 

Sure seems to me that Schidle needed to be more clear, security concerns or not, on where the info came from in this instance. And it is always best to overuse attribution than assume the reader will assume that a passage all comes from the same source.

And as a side note, Ben Montgomery is an excellent writer.