Am I a plagiarist?

When I see a newspaper article similar to that, I usually see the byline include "From wire services and other sources".

You probably should mentioned the fact that some of the details came from wire services, but I don't see it as being plagiarism. I would write a short note to the editor explaining what happened to the editor (if you haven't already), and apologizing for any carelessness or misunderstanding. With some of the recent incidences on their minds, I'm sure many editors are being very cautious about anything even vaguely approaching plagiarism.

Just my thoughts on the subject. I'm no expert on writing for newspapers.

If you took content of a story ran by any media, and did not attribute it to that media, then yes, it is plagarism. Doesn't matter whether you made direct claims to the content being your own creation or not.

However, general facts, such as "Bill Clinton was the last Democrat President" cannot be plagarized.

My father worked for a big newspaper for 47 years. Yes, if you don't include proper attribution, you get in deep, deep trouble. If you were in a more prominent position, it could be terminal trouble.

Be careful.

The statements that you lifted from the wire service and claimed to have been made directly to you were plagiarism. Remember that WaPo reporter who wrote the story about those two freeway gunmen and did not even really interview anyone, but wrote his stories from the internet while, as I recall, he was taking a free vacation? I think what you did was similar. I hope you do not get a reputation, and that your editor gives you another chance. Good luck with this.

The rules and guidelines for journalism are very strict. If you didn't write it, you have to attribute to the original source. Even if it's one generic line -- the fact is, you've used every single word another writer has written. If you have taken the gist from that sentence from the wire and made it your own, then you'd be okay since it was rather general.

When it comes to plagiarism, it comes down to intent. I'm sure 10,000 writers may have written exactly the same sentence: "Bill Clinton was the last Democratic President." The trouble is, you know you didn't write it on your own; you know it was taken verbatim from a wire story; and you know you use it without any attribution. I'd say that qualifies as plagiarism.

alleycat said:

. . .You probably should mentioned the fact that some of the details came from wire services, but I don't see it as being plagiarism. I would write a short note to the editor explaining what happened to the editor (if you haven't already), and apologizing for any carelessness or misunderstanding. With some of the recent incidences on their minds, I'm sure many editors are being very cautious about anything even vaguely approaching plagiarism.

Just my thoughts on the subject. I'm no expert on writing for newspapers.

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Just wanted to echo this.

Seems like you should have attributed the quotes to the wire service story, but I don't think using the phrase "Bill Clinton was the last Democratic President," is plagiarism. It's just fact, like "the sky is blue." It's not an idea or theory or set of words that someone else owns. And rewording it to something like "the sky is similar in hue to a robin's egg," would just be silly.

I'm confused here.

That one sentence alone should not have sparked the editor's attention. (As an editor myself, it wouldn't have caught mine.) if you put it in quotes, or made it look as though it came from an interview you did, that's different, but it doesn't sound as if either of those things was done.

I'm going to ask for clarification on this before weighing in. The sentence itself seems innocent enough. Something else must have caught the editor's attention, or there is something else going on here.

I believe, from reading the original post, that something was taken from a media report, and he tacked something to the effect of the Bill Clinton thing onto the end of it. So, it was something like this:

I'm going to ask for clarification on this before weighing in. The sentence itself seems innocent enough. Something else must have caught the editor's attention, or there is something else going on here. But Bill Clinton was the last democratic President.

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That was my impression at least.

There's been a recent flap with AP charging for quotes from their stories, with full attribution, of as little as five words.

eScotty said:

Although the newspaper is paying me a kill fee and implied that they want me to write for them again, this has been such an upsetting experience that I plan to keep my distance from them, at least for quite a while.

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Ooops... not sure I'd go along with this decision. If there's any divided opinion about whether you're "guilty," I would think behaving as if you were would eliminate all doubt! Others may not agree, but I think that, under the same circumstances, I might get right back up on that particular horse and prove that it was inadvertent, lesson enough for a lifetime, and an opportunity to justify their faith in coming back to you for more work.

I thank all of you for your responses. Some of you considered what I did to be plagiarism, while others think not.

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I reread this thread and it seems that everyone fell on the side of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is taking an article word for word from another source and pawning it off as your own. But, I respectfully have to disagree with a few of the above posters - it's not so cut and dry.

1. Rewriting or copying a feature/exclusive story is cut and dry plagerism. No excuse.

2. Copying word for word from any news story is cut and dry plagerism, even if it's just a sentence. No excuse.

3. Rewriting stories that have more than 3 news sources attributed to it is not plagiarism. 3 is a safe number - if you find the same story in 3 other locations, that's fair enough to assume it's public domain, and you do not have to say which news source you got it from. Same with quotes - if 3 different news sources have the same quote (and don't attribute it to any other newssource), that's enough to assume that quote was not spoken in exclusive content and is public domain. No one can claim plagiarism against you if you can pull the same facts from 2 other sources.

4. If you cannot find 3 sources for any fact/quote you want to include, you do need to cite it. Attributing facts and quotes is always a safe thing to do when you can, as you don't vouch for the accuracy - the person you attribute it to does. So do it as often as you can, if there's any doubt.

Anyway, that's my take on it. I'm involved in sports writing, which is a much looser style of journalism and more revolved around style of writing than actual facts - the kids always go to the sports section, and they want to be entertained first, informed second.

I don't personally feel you did anything unethical, though the view does seem to clash with folks above me.

Mharvey said:

No one can claim plagiarism against you if you can pull the same facts from 2 other sources.

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Whoa.... put the brakes on that idea right away.

It doesn't matter how many different sources you can find it in. If you don't attribute where you got your information from, it counts as plagiarism. It doesn't even have to be direct quotes. If you are writing an article, and you read three other articles on the same thing, as an editor I want to see those in your sources list. Even if you don't directly quote them.

Because if you don't, and I read one of those "inspiring articles" and see that yours came after, you've just put yourself in a big hole.

There is a large, LARGE difference between "public domain" and 2 or 3 sources.

As an illustrative example: you don't have to cite source for who fought in and won the Battle of the Bulge. That's common knowledge/public domain. But if you start rattling off the number of troops, specific tactical information, and other like details (which you can easily find in more than 3 sources) you'd *still* better cite where you got it from.

There is no "magic number" for sources. It's content that drives this issue, not quantity.

escritora said:

I reread this thread and it seems that everyone fell on the side of plagiarism.

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I didn't. I don't consider the "Bill Clinton was the last Democratic President," line to be plagiarism.

I'm not ready yet to label the OP a plagiarist because of the quotes either. I'm unfamiliar with the applicable rules, and there seems to be some disagreement about what is allowed, and what is not.

I don't think what any of us (barring any of the posters being actual journalists) thinks matters. At all.

What matters is the EDITOR thought this was plagarism. Period. End of story. As it was. Part of the editor's job is to protect his/her publication and writers from lawsuits, etc. In this day and age of Frey and Glass, I'd imagine more editors are falling on the side of caution, and they should.

I don't know if our OP is still reading this thread, but just in case, I echo the advice of someone else -- write a short apology note, and make your next article for them perfect and squeaky clean, and do it quickly. That's how you show it was an honest and unintended mistake, not by hiding or running away.

James D. Macdonald said:

There's been a recent flap with AP charging for quotes from their stories, with full attribution, of as little as five words.

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Yes, and it seems to be completely outside of the law for them to ask this (see http://boingboing.net/2008/06/17/associated-press-exp.html and http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010341.html ) however, I can easily see cautious editors getting in a flap about it.

eScotty said:

I thank all of you for your responses. Some of you considered what I did to be plagiarism, while others think not. This suggests to me that this is a grey area with room for differences of opinion. I will have to be a lot more careful in the future--with other cients. Although the newspaper is paying me a kill fee and implied that they want me to write for them again, this has been such an upsetting experience that I plan to keep my distance from them, at least for quite a while.

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I think most of us believe what you did would not be plagiarism if you did it unintentionally and completely by accident (i.e. if you wrote "Bill Clinton was the last Democratic President" without sourcing it and without believing that any of your specific sources had used that exact wording, but then later some article was found that did use that exact wording). If the first person to use any seven-word sentence owned the copyright of that sentence, the entire business of writing would be fraught with peril and full of silly, over-worded sentences.

However, exact quotes without attribution, even when very short and concerning facts that are common knowledge, are on shaky ethical ground at best, even in those cases when they wouldn't hold up as wrongdoing in a court of law.

Also, apart from the purely ethical concerns of plagiarism, the law considers copyright violations of any kind (plagiarism is often, but not always, a copyright violation) to be "intentless" which means that your personal intention and belief has no bearing on whether you violated copyright or not (however, the severity of any penalties imposed can have something to do with a copyright-violator's intentions).

Yes, Alia. I see you are correct. I reread the thread again. In fact, you were not the only one who expressed a differing opinion.

It is hard to say what happened without actually seeing your article along with the wire service story you took quotes from. I am guessing, though, that the one sentence in combination with those quotes made it too obvious that this was all material taken from the wire service story. In other words, the sentence alone may not have been problematic, but it started to look like a whole chunk of info. was copied from the original source. Of course, this may not be the case at all. I am just guessing based on similar situations I have seen during my time as a magazine editor.

slcboston said:

Whoa.... put the brakes on that idea right away.

It doesn't matter how many different sources you can find it in. If you don't attribute where you got your information from, it counts as plagiarism. It doesn't even have to be direct quotes. If you are writing an article, and you read three other articles on the same thing, as an editor I want to see those in your sources list. Even if you don't directly quote them.

Because if you don't, and I read one of those "inspiring articles" and see that yours came after, you've just put yourself in a big hole.

There is a large, LARGE difference between "public domain" and 2 or 3 sources.

As an illustrative example: you don't have to cite source for who fought in and won the Battle of the Bulge. That's common knowledge/public domain. But if you start rattling off the number of troops, specific tactical information, and other like details (which you can easily find in more than 3 sources) you'd *still* better cite where you got it from.

There is no "magic number" for sources. It's content that drives this issue, not quantity.

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It's a bit different in my line of work- the only real hard statistics I deal with are sports related. It's real redundant to say "According to Major League Baseball Statistics, Alex Rodriguez is Batting .XXX" or "According to the National Football League, Chad Johnson received for XXXX yards in 20XX." That just clutters up the story with needless attribution, and cramps the style.

I still don't believe OP's case even comes close to plagiarism. Saying "Bill Clinton was the last Democratic president" is synonymous with saying: "Yesterday, the sun rose."

What I meant by "No one can claim plagiarism against you if you can pull the same facts from 2 other sources" is that the claim is laughable if you can produce 3, 6, 9... 100 sources that all confirm a fact you've written in your story. As a poster above me said, it's still shaky ethical ground not to cite any fact you learn from another story, but nothing bores a reader to death more than seeing "According to X, Y," every line of a story in some form or another. Save the attributions for the little known facts that you have to spend a significant time researching. Give props where it's due to folks who have put in hours finding something out few others know in the world. On the other hand, things that are well documented in many different places *probably* aren't going to raise many red flags.

Then again, some editors are very traditional... so the bottom line is do whatever your editor tells you to do. He's the one writing your checks. If he tells you to cite every single fact you use, and you wanna say the sun rose yesterday... get on the phone with some astronomers to confirm it, then cite their full names and titles.

Plagiarism in Fiction

Hi All,

I have a question on plagiarism in general, and in Fiction. May I ask it here please? I felt a bit shy creating a new thread just for this. But this is a question that continuously bothers me these days.

1. Let’s take a small but very expressive sentence of an original writer, for example. A sentence that really stands out in his book, or at least it does so for me. If supposedly, I like it so much that I want to replicate its style and its rhythm, changing all the words in it completely and thus certainly changing the meaning of it. Or, to explain it differently, if I have composed my own sentence about something absolutely different, but now I just want to structure it in the same style, rhythm and music of that author. Will I be plagiarizing?

2. (well, two questions, actually, sorry about it). If a certain writer has a distinct idea/thought in his sentence that I want to repeat, but I will change the wording of it, in fact, I will make two or three sentences out of the original one, or visa-versa, completely paraphrasing it to point of it becoming unrecognizable. Will I still be plagiarizing his idea alone?

I apologize if it sounded a little preposterous perhaps, I am only just learning, and I will know from what you will tell me.

JeanneTGC said:

I don't think what any of us (barring any of the posters being actual journalists) thinks matters. At all.

What matters is the EDITOR thought this was plagarism. Period. End of story. As it was. Part of the editor's job is to protect his/her publication and writers from lawsuits, etc. In this day and age of Frey and Glass, I'd imagine more editors are falling on the side of caution, and they should.

I don't know if our OP is still reading this thread, but just in case, I echo the advice of someone else -- write a short apology note, and make your next article for them perfect and squeaky clean, and do it quickly. That's how you show it was an honest and unintended mistake, not by hiding or running away.

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I concur with this. If the editor came across something questionable in your article that raised the suspicion of plaigiarism, in my opinion you should take it as a good sign that he mentioned it to you. It means that he's willing to take another chance on you and that the incident, while raising red flags, did not get you automatically tossed into the "do not use" bin.

Don't keep your distance. You feel awkward, but if they're willing to give you another assignment, take it. Do an awesome job, and be exhaustingly scrupulous. In other words, follow up with an impressive rebound that will assuage any concerns.

Gah. I was involved in a bicker about plagiarism recently on another writing board, and was told that I was making a fuss about nothing. A couple of people actually said that plagiarism doesn't do any harm, and it's not serious. It made me so VERY upset.

The OP is dealing with this, and all is fine, but I just wanted to remind everyone here. Just to underline the point.

Plagiarism is stealing. No excuses.

Phaedo said:

1. Let’s take a small but very expressive sentence of an original writer, for example. A sentence that really stands out in his book, or at least it does so for me. If supposedly, I like it so much that I want to replicate its style and its rhythm, changing all the words in it completely and thus certainly changing the meaning of it. Or, to explain it differently, if I have composed my own sentence about something absolutely different, but now I just want to structure it in the same style, rhythm and music of that author. Will I be plagiarizing?

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No, don't worry about it. Especially when starting out, that kind of thing can be a good way to help you eventually find your own distinct voice.

Phaedo said:

2. (well, two questions, actually, sorry about it). If a certain writer has a distinct idea/thought in his sentence that I want to repeat, but I will change the wording of it, in fact, I will make two or three sentences out of the original one, or visa-versa, completely paraphrasing it to point of it becoming unrecognizable. Will I still be plagiarizing his idea alone?

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No, ideas can't be copyrighted, so legally you wouldn't be plagiarising. But coming up with your own stuff is a lot more satisfying than rehashing someone else's.

Being inspired by other people's work, that's a different story. That happens all the time. At least it does to me.