From Reuters.com
Malcolm Gladwell denies Lehrer plagiarized him
On Tuesday Jim Romenesko ran a post on his blog that showed how Jonah Lehrer, the New Yorker’s new staff writer, had copied sections of his previous writing and repurposed them for his recent NewYorker.com pieces, verbatim. Bloggers quickly found more instances, including one in which Lehrer appeared not to copy himself, but Malcom Gladwell, another New Yorker staff writer. Gladwell and Lehrer both use the same quote from William Goldman’s book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, and introduce the quote with the same language.
In a recent Reuters column, Jack Shafer mentioned that allegation. Gladwell, in the comments section, offered his response to the allegation:
In 2006, I quoted a line from William Goldman about how no one knows anything in Hollywood. In Imagine, Jonah Lehrer quotes the same line. This is not surprising, since Goldman’s comment is one of the most famous things ever written about Hollywood and has been quoted, by journalists, probably hundreds of times since it was written. If Lehrer is plagiarizing me, by quoting the same quote I quoted, then I am plagiarizing the person who used that quote before me, and that person is plagiarizing the person who quoted it before them, and so on and so forth, and we have a daisy chain of “plagiarizing” going back forty years and plagiarism, as a ethical concept, has ceased to mean anything at all.
By the way, if I run across the same absurd allegation anywhere else, I intend to reproduce my comment verbatim. Why? Because I thought about what I wanted to say, I’m comfortable with the way I said it, and I see no reason to tinker with my own language for the sake of tinkering with my own language.
On the front line with female war reporters
Female war correspondents are no longer a novelty. The legendary 20th century author and journalist Martha Gellhorn broke that mold around 80 years ago, and in recent times many of our most accomplished journalists and chroniclers of war zones — among them CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the BBC’s formidable Kate Adie, Alex Crawford from Sky News and others — just happened to be women.
Male news executives like to think we have become more enlightened over the years as we made decisions about who should cover wars and who was not suited and should stay at home.
The euro zone deal diagram
A diagram of “the euro zone rescue deal” shared by an unidentified adviser with one of the EU governments involved in the negotiations.
A belated disclosure
On August 22, Reuters.com published a video entitled “Twitter through the eye of an artist,” a profile of the New York-based artist Michelle Vaughn. Vaughn is married to Reuters blogger Felix Salmon; although Salmon played no role in producing the video, that relationship should have been disclosed in the video. Reuters apologizes for the omission.
WITNESS: An evening with Ratko Mladic
By Paul Holmes
More than 18 years have passed since my first encounter with Ratko Mladic but I still see him standing there, an intense, angry look in his eyes. He clasped his hands together and squeezed them more and more tightly until his fingers turned red and his knuckles went white.
I had asked the Bosnian Serb commander about the siege his forces had laid to the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. The massacre there, the worst of the many atrocities perpetrated against Bosnian Muslims by Mladic’s army, was still two years away but this was his way of demonstrating that there would be no escape for its inhabitants.
Tarmac torture
By Chris Taylor
“You weren’t on that Cathay Pacific flight, were you?”
People have been asking me this question with a unique mix of sympathy and outright horror. And the answer is yes. The one that idled for 11 hours on the tarmac of New York’s JFK Airport, as we waited in vain for a gate. With two kids crawling over me, ages 2 and 5.
Yes, I was on that flight. And this is what it was like.
It was actually our second time boarding Flight 888, since the previous day, we’d been delayed until 1 a.m. and then sat on the Vancouver tarmac for three hours, until they finally sent us away at around 4 a.m. because of the blizzard in New York City. Frustrating, sure. But still within the bounds of human normalcy.
The dinosaur has arrived — an original story by R.L. Stine
– This original story by R.L. Stine was written for Reuters.com. R.L.’s books are read all over the world. So far, he has sold over 350 million books, making him one of the best-selling children’s authors in history. –
Shivering in the hall, I looked forward to the warmth of the radio studio. I felt the cold as if it was trapped inside my overcoat. The frosted glass of the door looked like snow to me. I pushed it open with one gloved hand.
A future for news
Devin Wenig is CEO, Thomson Reuters Markets
Much of the last few years have been spent discussing how journalism will survive in the face of the immense changes taking place in the industry. The digital revolution, the shift in advertising-based business models and the explosion of content sources has turned the consuming, dissemination and publishing of news on its head.
Most popular videos of 2010
From the iPad to a bus siege in Manila to top model gaffes and bejeweled bras, 2010 was an eventful year. Reuters videographers were on the scene at many of these major stories to bring viewers the latest news, often at great risk to themselves as seen by the tragic death of a Reuters cameraman in Thailand. Their work, sometimes daring, sometimes fun, prompted our audience to click and share. Here’s a look at the most popular video from each month.
JANUARY: Apple ready for big device debut
The launch of Apple’s iPad was a highly anticipated event and it propelled this preview video to the most popular for January.
