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Plagiarism: When Good Teens Go Bad By
Wendy Zang, Voices editor, Reading (Pa.) Eagle/Times
One Thursday afternoon in early January, I was plugging along editing copy when I came across a movie review that was quite good-too good. My 17-year-old, average-writing-ability junior was using phrases like "not your usual cineplex fare." It was not your usual teen-section fare. A quick Yahoo search turned up lots of movie reviews from lots of sources. I clicked on the first one. And there it was - exactly the same as my teen's review. She had copied the whole thing, word for word. While I was still somewhere between total shock and seething with anger, our photo editor, a former English teacher, came up to me with a review by the same teen that had appeared in that day's section. He also had a printout of an eerily similar review from a Web site.
We're not alone In a brief discussion with my managing editor, we decided to relieve the student of her duties. Her action was just too egregious to tolerate. I sent off a note to the YEAA listserv in search of support and guidance. I was happy to know that I was not alone. Then again, it's horrifying to know that so many others have experienced the same thing. And it's not just teen sections. The San Jose Mercury News was burned twice recently by interns who plagiarized or fabricated parts of their stories. And several veteran reporters have been fired for plagiarism in the past year, including a political reporter at the Sacramento Bee who admitted to taking quotes from other newspapers, according to Editor & Publisher. E&P pointed out the most frightening part of this in a January editorial: "Last March, Michael Bugeja, a professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism of Ohio University, warned in these pages of a 'new breed of plagiarist' showing up in class. They consider foolish anyone who does not use a computer's copy-and-paste function on the Internet to grab a felicitous turn of phrase -or to complete an entire assignment. They cannot understand the outrage of writers whose words are stolen." What we did
By 5:30 p.m. that day, I had my young plagiarist on the phone. I told her what I had discovered and that we no longer wanted her working for Voices. She did not try to deny the act, nor did she try to defend what she did. What she didn't understand was how the punishment fit the crime. She kept asking if she could rewrite the latest story or if she could just be suspended for a while. I did my best to explain that there are some mistakes that are so egregious, so horrible, that you cannot come back from them - and that this was one of them. All you can do is move on, learn from the experience and never do it again, which is something I hope she does. As for Voices, we ran a correction box identifying who should have been credited with the story. I also used this as an opportunity to discuss plagiarism with the rest of my staff. At our next meeting, I handed out a sheet explaining what plagiarism is, why it's so bad and how to attribute facts and phrases properly. I told them about the incident without naming names. And I did my best to put the fear of God in them. I know that I'll give the speech to each group of new writers we get now. Let's hope it will do the trick. Members Respond YEAA members were quick to respond to Wendy Zang's plea for help. Read what they had to say about the situation and about plagiarism. |
