Romenesko and Poynter

I know that Romensko is pretty widely read here, but I was pretty surprised to see today's post.

Poynter.org works hard to meet the highest standards of journalism excellence, and I learned late Wednesday that we have not consistently met those standards.
A centerpiece of our editorial work has been the Romenesko blog, which invented a form of aggregation that is widely and deservedly respected. It is also imperfect.
Thanks to the sharp eye of an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, I now know that Jim Romenesko’s posts exhibit a pattern of incomplete attribution.

Romenesko offered his resignation, but it was declined. I can buy his statement that he was trying to put everything in the source's words, but a journalism watchdog site can't afford to cut corners.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/152802/questions-over-romeneskos-attributions-spur-changes-in-writing-editing/#more-152802

 

That's what happens when you get lazy.

 

I really don't see the huge deal. He writes "the paper writes" and "according to blah blah blah" all the time in his short posts and provides direct links. He also quotes pretty extensively. Does anyone really read that paragraph and not think it's a direct summary of the tribune story? This doesn't strike me as a guy trying to pass other people's work off as his own.

Poynter should turn more attention to not being ESPN's lap dog and not get into an uproar of this crap.

 

I don't think industry professionals think he's doing a straight copy-and-paste job.

 

I suppose I see the issue. I guess.
But Romenesko used phraseology such as "The Tribune notes that" and "The paper reports" and "The paper found that the kinds of records it wants..."
Don't get me wrong, quotes should have been used. But Romenesko wasn't, at least in my eyes, trying to pass the work off as his own.
He qualified three paragraphs with attribution. Hardly a burn-at-the-stake moment for me.

 

That's why I used the term lazy, because he's an aggregator who should get the benefit of the doubt one time. If he's done it with other posts, it's a little more serious.

 

I'm with Gawker:

http://gawker.com/5858375/the-preposterous-plagiarism-assault-on-romenesko

 

He's still got Starbucksgossip.com.

 

Yes, Romenesko had us all fooled, stealing others' work.

Sheesh.

Another take on how silly this is:

http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/the-intolerable-evolution-of-poynters-romenesko

 

Yeah, soon enough it's going to flip-turn into nobody caring about plagiarism charges anymore, because the charges that get lodged are often so ridiculous. This would be the most ridiculous case.

Poynter has really fallen out of touch in the last 5-10 years. Worthless to the news industry anymore.

 

Julie Moos isn't impressing me. She's obviously trying to play the "ethics" card to the ridiculous extreme, and the NYT weighed in on this, too.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/journalism-ethics-taken-too-seriously-romenesko-scolded-on-his-own-blog/

 

It's Poynter's way of seeing Romenesko and his $170K salary out the door. Moos is the axperson.