Jack Shafer

BuzzFeed, the aggregation/social-media site, has thrown itself into the content creation business with some big hires. Today, BuzzFeed’s co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti crowed about picking up Politico’s Ben Smith as its editor-in-chief. Smith, as Politico readers know, breaks news the way rioters break glass: Frequently and with glee. Last week, BuzzFeed added Whitney Jefferson and Matt Cherette from the Gawker enterprise, and a dozen new editorial hires are promised.

The addition of original content (also known as “journalism”) to the aggregator model isn’t without precedent. There are plenty of large Web sites that devote themselves to both, such as Huffington Post, Mediaite, Business Insider, Atlantic Wire, and Gawker, to name a few. But for an established aggregator like BuzzFeed to enter the original content sweepstakes at this point is a little like a slaughterhouse attaching a storefront to its entrance and opening a steakhouse in hopes of selling even more meat.

Actually, the BuzzFeed transition will be even bigger than from slaughterhouse to steakhouse. Today, it’s essentially an entertainment site, a place best known for its goofy distractions and silly videos. Smith tells Nieman Journalism Lab that his goal is to “hire reporters who get scoops the same way they have always have” with phone calls, “trips to Iowa, drinks with political operatives.”

The economics of adding original content to an aggregation site are strong. Take, for example, Fark, the popular social media and aggregation site that Drew Curtis started in 1999 and still runs. Curtis describes Fark as a bit of a closed loop: 96 percent of its traffic is “organic,” which means most of its users reach the site by directly entering its URL or by clicking a bookmark for it. Similarly, its inbound traffic of 50 million page views a month is equal to its outbound traffic of about 50 million clicks to other sites. This means that that on average, Fark visitors tend to click one link out to one original page for each page of Fark that they consume.

“I could double my traffic overnight if I started doing original content,” Curtis says. Original pieces would obviously attract additional page views. More elaborate summaries of other sites’s stories by staffers, especially summaries that are especially insightful or argumentative, could possibly capture many of the page views that Fark currently sends to the story originators (in its current iteration, Fark provides only a snappy headline for the outbound links).

Such a bundle of original copy and full-throated summaries could also attract links from search engines, something that the current Fark almost never gets. Curtis says he hasn’t staffed up with original content because he doesn’t have to—he’s self-funded with no investors to please. “We’re trying to retain what we’re doing,” Curtis says. Quantcast puts his monthly traffic at 1.7 million visitors, compared to 16.6 million for BuzzFeed and 62.4 million for Huffington Post.

“It’s difficult to self-fund that kind of expansion. I don’t have resources to hire 10 people right now unless there’s 100 percent chance of success because anything less would mean the increase in overhead would run us out of business in 3-6 months,” he adds.

BuzzFeed has a number of outside backers, making the editorial additions less of a gamble. According to the New York Observer, they include Softbank, Hearst Interactive, RRE Ventures, and Ken Lerer, who is Peretti’s BuzzFeed partner, and like Peretti helped found the Huffington Post.

The trick to leveraging BuzzFeed into a HuffPo competitor will be to 1) do what HuffPo does, only do it better or 2) do something HuffPo doesn’t do. BuzzFeed’s newsroom, which is outgunned by at least 10 to 1, can’t do what HuffPo does better. So it will have to settle for doing something different. Apparently that will be to use the social- and sharing-power of the site to, as Peretti told Nieman‘s Megan Garber, “build the definitive social news organization.”

How difficult will it be to attract the sort of readers who want to share political news or even care about it? The content tabs at the top of the current BuzzFeed home page tout “LOL,” “Cute,” “Win,” “Fail,” “OMG,” “Geeky,” “Trashy,” “WTF,” and “Random,” and the site’s official welcome to Smith gave him the extreme LOL treatment. That’s not to say that inserting a “Politics” tab into the mix will be impossible, but it will depend on BuzzFeed’s viral engine kicking in hard and Smith getting the scoops he promises.

I admire Smith’s work, so I have far fewer worries about him producing quality journalism than I do of him attracting the audience he deserves. Obviously, he can’t carry the site to new heights all by himself. BuzzFeed needs to add a couple more original content tabs—entertainment, business, tech, and lifestyle—just to pinch a few from HuffPo’s navigation banner, to make BuzzFeed a complete news destination rather than a fun niche.

And thus the daily newspaper is reborn again.

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ILLUSTRATION: Anthony DeRosa. Photo Daniel J. Sieradski via Flickr.

Media columnist Jim Romenesko—who was scheduled to depart his full-time position at the Poynter Institute at the end of the year, anyway—vacated it abruptly yesterday after his boss, Julie Moos, publicly criticized his “incomplete” methods of attributing other journalists’ copy in his summaries of their work.

For those who haven’t followed the story—and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, because it’s so inside baseball it’s inside the laces of the ball—Romenesko has been writing a Web-based cheat sheet about the news business since 1999. The column, which the non-profit Poynter Institute picked up in 2000, has been an indispensable destination for journalists and civilians interested in the media. (Interests declared: Romenesko has cited my work many times since 1999. For the last 10 weeks, Poynter has been paying me to participate in weekly, hour-long Web chats with readers.)

In declaring a “pattern of incomplete attribution,” Moos pointed to a recent example from Romenesko’s work in which he ran whole sentences from a Chicago Tribune story in his summary of it without placing the words in quotation marks or block quotation to indicate its exact provenance.

Romenesko’s style was not Poynter’s style, Moos wrote, commenting that, “One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.”

Like Moos, I think that Romenesko should have placed in quotation marks (or block quotations) copy taken from stories he summarized. When I’ve worked as an editor, that has been my standard. As a writer, I follow the same code. If anything, I overdo the quotation-marks thing. You’re free to criticize the windy way Moos explains Poynter’s policy and its inquiry, but as the editor she’s well within her rights to set attribution rules.

But the perplexing thing about the Romenesko dust-up is that, as Moos notes, nobody ever noticed Romenesko’s style of non-attribution until Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Erika Fry brought it to Poynter’s attention. Those nobodies include the Poynter editors who have been reading Romenesko’s work behind him for the last 12 years. (Romenesko has traditionally posted his copy without going through an editor.) Other nobodies apparently include the thousands of journalists Romenesko has summarized over the years. According to the Moos post, no writer or publication had ever told Poynter “their words were being co-opted.”

Moos continues, “That raises some questions of its own.”

How is it that the incomplete attribution escaped Romenesko’s readers notice for so long? Vain journalists—is there any other kind?—love to scream plagiarism. They love to scream it not just when their words are lifted but when they think their ideas have been purloined! Given that Romenesko’s blog is the most avidly read page in the journalism business, one would think that his “incompleteness” would have been uncovered earlier.

Yet it wasn’t. I’ve read every Romenesko condensation of my work since his column began, but as I tweeted yesterday, the only unusual thing I ever noticed about his work was a knack for locating my misplaced openings and highlighting them.

My theory of why careful readers have been blind to Romenesko’s incomplete attribution isn’t really my theory. I’ve pinched it from Richard A. Posner, a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He lays it out succinctly in his 2007 volume, The Little Book of Plagiarism.

Now, nobody at Poynter has accused Romenesko of plagiarism. I am not accusing him of plagiarism. I bring up the word, and Posner’s meditations on it, to help explain 1) why nobody previously noticed non-attribution in Romenesko columns and 2) why we shouldn’t be upset with Romenesko for his technique. Posner writes:

A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying, besides being deceitful in the sense of misleading the intended readers, induce reliance by them.

By reliance, Posner means that the reader does something “because he thinks the plagiarizing work original” that he would not have done if fully informed of the full truth of the work’s provenance. “Lawyers call this ‘detrimental’ reliance,” Posner continues, “that is, relying to your detriment on a falsehood.” Posner gives the example of reader who would not buy a book if he knew it contained “large swatches of another writer’s book.” Instead, the reader would buy the original author’s book.

Moving from Posner back to Romenesko, it’s obvious to me and thousands of other readers that Romenesko made no claim that the primary findings in his posts were originally his. Quite the contrary, the style of his attribution—a link back to the original story, inclusion of the name of the publication and often that of the author—advertises in every possible way that the Romenesko version is the derivative, not the original. Indeed, the Romenesko gestalt has been to steer readers back to the original. His whole enterprise since 1999 has been to alert and direct reader attention to original work, from Manhattan to the boonies! Far from exploiting the work of others and hyping his product, Romenesko always seemed to tamp down the most excitable aspects of the work he summarized. He never tried to distort or sensationalize like our friends at Business Insider and Huffington Post. In his hands, a story about the coming Apocalypse would be summarized as impending bad weather.

We can argue whether Romenesko is guilty of “over-aggregation.” I’m not as bothered by over-aggregation as other journalists, a sentiment I expressed a few months ago at Slate. I’d also be more impressed by over-aggregation charges against Romenesko if the complainants were journalists he has summarized. But my anecdotal evidence is that they’re not. Yesterday, 15 or 20 minutes after the Poynter piece went up, the usual gang of press writers, whose every cough and fart end up in Romenesko’s column, stood up for the blogger on Twitter. They rendered a basketball court verdict of no harm, no foul.

Erika Fry, the Columbia Journalism Review staffer whose inquiries stirred Poynter to action against Romenesko, published her piece this afternoon accusing other Poynterites of over-aggregation. Based on the evidence Fry presents against them, again I’d say no harm, no foul here, too.

If Romenesko is guilty of over-aggregation, I hope he continues the practice when he gets www.jimromenesko.com rolling.

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PHOTO: Marcus Lewis (L) of the U.S. fouls Kelvin Pena of the Dominican Republic as they jump for a rebound during their men’s preliminary round basketball game at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara October 26, 2011. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

An editor must have a heart like leather. Not freshly tanned leather—all supple and yielding like a baby’s bum—but like an abandoned baseball glove that’s been roasting in the Sonoran Desert for five or six years. Only those who are hard of heart can properly deal with the plagiarists who violate the journalistic code.

I’m pleased to report that this morning Politico‘s top editors, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, were rock-hearted in resolving charges that their reporter, Kendra Marr, lifted material from the New York Times, the Associated Press, Scripps Howard, Greenwire, The Hill, and elsewhere for at least seven of her stories with no attribution. Marr has resigned. Harris and VandeHei’s compact statement about Marr’s disgrace doesn’t use the word plagiarism, but should, as my friend the press critic Craig Silverman points out. I agree.

“There are no mitigating circumstances for plagiarism,” the cold, cold heart of Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli stated earlier this year after Post reporter Sari Horwitz got caught stealing copy from the Arizona Republic.

Brauchli got it exactly right. It doesn’t matter if you pinched copy because you were tired, you were harried, your spouse or child was sick or dying, you were under deadline pressure, you jumbled up your notes, you took boilerplate or wire copy that nobody should really claim “authorship” over,  you have a substance problem, you committed a cut-and-paste error, you were blinded by the “warp speed” of the Internet, you were a victim of the “win the morning” culture, you are young and inexperienced, you had two windows open at the same time and confused them, or any of the excuses tendered by the accused reporters described in Trudy Lieberman’s 1995 Columbia Journalism Review article.

These aren’t excuses. These are confessions. And they mitigate nothing.

As I’ve written before, plagiarism doesn’t offend me because it exploits the previous hard work of some enterprising writer—even though it does. When you attribute passages to another writer, you’re likewise exploiting their work. But at least they receive psychic income from the citation. The quoted writer is enriched by the fact that their work has been acknowledged, that somebody might go back and read their work, and that their reputation is likely to rise because of the credit thrown their way.

Spare the violated writer any pity. He’ll be okay. Give your pity to readers, who are the real victims.

The plagiarist defrauds readers by leading them to believe that he has come by the facts of his story first-hand–that he vouches for the accuracy of the facts and interpretations under his byline. But this is not the case. Generally, the plagiarist doesn’t know whether the copy he’s lifted has gotten the story right because he hasn’t really investigated the topic. (If he had, he could write the story himself.) In such cases he must attribute the material he borrows so that at the very least the reader can hold somebody accountable for the facts in a story.

Or to put it another way, a journalist who does original work essentially claims, this is true, according to me. The conscientious journalist who cites the work of others essentially makes the claim that this is true, according to somebody else. The plagiarist makes no such claims in his work. By having no sources of his own and failing to point to the source he stole from, he breaks the “chain of evidence” that allows readers to contest or verify facts. By doing so, he produces worthless copy that wastes the time of his readers. And that’s the crime.

For evidence of how widespread journalistic plagiarism is, to appreciate the commonness of Marr’s transgression, search the word on the Poynter Institute website and scroll the scores of action reports. Plagiarism—like other forms of professional malpractice—can’t be eliminated. It can only be policed.

Please don’t confuse plagiarists with aggregators, which is tempting in this case because the transgressor is Politico. Oh, aggregators upset a lot of people, from Robert Thomson to Bill Keller. But as long as aggregators stay within the fair-use doctrine and cite the sources that they’re summarizing, I can’t complain. To cite myself, aggregators are serving “a huge, previously ignored readership out there [which] wants its news hot, quick, and tight,” an audience that the legacy media could have owned. Today, the Washington Post Co. finds itself playing aggregation catch-up via a beta project called Trove. It’s about time.

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The crime of plagiarism goes lightly punished, as Lieberman’s story reports, but is that why it persists? If you have any ideas, drop me a line at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is certified plagiarism-free. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)