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Jan 7 / King Kaufman

Plagiarism or just sloppy attribution? It doesn’t matter, so get it right

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A small plagiarism controversy that flared up on Twitter Monday is a great illustration of why it’s so important to attribute properly. And if you’re going to err in attribution, err on the side of too much.

Darren Rovell of ESPN wrote a piece, based on his own reporting, that said that BCS Championship Game tickets were selling cheap on the secondary market. Many sites aggregated Rovell’s story, repeating the facts he’d reported and linking to his work. One such aggregated piece was by Chris Mascaro, a freelancer at SI.com.

Disclosure note: SI.com and Bleacher Report are both Time-Warner companies, but their operations are completely separate.

In the afternoon, Cork Gaines, whose Twitter bio says he’s a molecular biologist and teacher who writes for BusinessInsider.com, tweeted that SI.com had cut-and-pasted Rovell, and included an illustrated screenshot of the two pieces.

Rovell asked his Twitter nemesis, Sports Illustrated media columnist Richard Deitsch, to comment. Deitsch, who is on vacation, agreed that the piece did not include appropriate attribution, and said he would forward the tweet to the SI.com news desk.

 

 

 

Deitsch, via email, told me that SI.com editors updated the piece shortly after they saw Rovell’s tweet. The updated story includes a note at the bottom reading, “An earlier version of this post failed to properly attribute reporting to ESPN’s Darren Rovell. We apologize for the error.”

Mascaro, the writer, defended himself shortly after the original tweet:

And then again several hours later, even after the story had been changed on SI.com.

 

I doubt that Columbia University’s School of Journalism, where Mascaro’s LinkeIn page says he earned a Master’s degree—and where Deitsch is an adjunct professor—would hold up Mascaro’s BCS ticket-price piece as an example of proper attribution in an aggregation story. Had it appeared on Bleacher Report, it would have been taken down quickly as a violation of B/R’s Attribution Guidelines.

Then again, he’s right: He clearly wasn’t trying to fool anyone into thinking he’d come up with the story himself or hadn’t read Rovell. But even if Mascaro was guilty of nothing more than sloppy attribution, it’s playing with fire to be sloppy with attribution. When it comes to important ethical issues in journalism, we live in a one strike and you’re out world.

And even if Mascaro could make a decent argument for his attribution method, why get into that fight? At the time the story posted, Mascaro had fewer than 400 Twitter followers, Rovell more than 400,000. Number of Twitter followers is not a good way to measure journalistic value and it’s not the only way to measure popularity. But it’s safe to say that a lot of people were introduced to Chris Mascaro yesterday, and their first impression was of him being called out for plagiarism.

Even if Rovell were standing on shaky ground with his complaint—and, to be clear, he was not—that’s no way to introduce yourself to new readers.

It’s a lot better to risk over-attributing than under-attributing. But of course the best course of action is to remember the all-important second half of Lennay’s Law: Tell us what you know, and tell us how you know it.

I emailed Mascaro for comment late Monday afternoon and will update this post if he responds.

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