You Say Plagiarism, I Say Duplicate Content (0)
some nitwit who copied passages because the idea of writing was more appealing than the writing itself.
Udolpho.com on Ben Domenech, 3/26/2006
New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd (461) has gotten herself into a pinch by lifting a paragraph written by blogger Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo fame and using it in one of her columns without attribution. That’s plagiarism (4,990).
In the dark world of Search Engine Optimization and affiliate marketing (the two of which I shall refer to collectively as online marketing) we don’t worry about plagiarism as much as so-called duplicate content. In our world we answer to a power much higher than editors, we answer to Google, and Google does not take kindly to duplicate content. Consequently, when I manage or supervise writers – or content writers as we are prone to call them in online marketing – I implore them to check phrases and sentences they write to make sure they aren’t identical or closely similar to existing copy on the web, especially when it comes to sentences that contain the keywords we try to push.
(Even on this monumentally unprofessional blog I put the vast majority of quoted text in blockquote tags and the remainder in quotes to inform both readers and search engine bots that the enclosed text is in fact a quote and could very well be found elsewhere, especially on pages I link to from that web page. Occasionally I also wrap the attribution in a cite tag to really drive home where I’m getting the material from, whether the the source is online or not.)
In other words, Dowd not only failed to live up to the standards I expect of part-time minimum wage writers, she merrily violated those standards by knowingly, willfully lifting copy.
But Dowd is far from a part-time minimum wage writer (0) looking to build her portfolio. She is a big deal, at the top of the journalistic totem pole, a brand name more than a writer. What she writes about and how she writes is a good deal more important than what she actually writes. If you are a fan and frequent reader of Dowd and the mind-candy she regularly outputs in her column do you really care if she occasionally adds some candy that isn’t strictly speaking hers? As a fan of Dowd (0), how harshly do you want her to be punished for bringing you witticisms even wittier than what she can produce? If you, like me, aren’t a fan of hers and never read her stuff and pretty much don’t even give her existence much thought unless she happens to augment some content of hers with a few lines written by a better and harder-working writer, well, how much does it really bother you that she isn’t as good as perhaps some would want to have you believe?
We are, after all, talking about one insipid paragraph in a long stream insipid name-brand content that’s been output by Dowd over the course of many years. I compare Dowd’s error to the kind of transgressions radio talk show hosts occasionally commit. Radio yakkers typically yak for several hours each day and it doesn’t strike me as particularly outrageous, or even noteworthy, that they cross the line from time to time. I suggested yesterday that journalists who plagiarize should have to send half their paycheck to the writer they victimize. The kind of plagiarists I had in mind for the half-a-pay-check punishment are columnists.
My lax standards for op-ed columnists don’t extend to reporters. If, say, Boston Globe’s reporter Maria Cramer stole a paragraph or two from a blogger to spice up an article she would seriously undermine the credibility of her work. Likewise, if you write novels, essays or science papers of one kind or another you pretty much burn yourself when you plagiarize.
Perhaps I have a misplaced lack of respect and appreciation for the Dowds of the world.
(Number of exact matches on Google for the preceding phrase)
