Clear case of in-house plagiarism

Pressure contributed to a talented intern’s error of judgment

As I’ve written in the past, any allegation of plagiarism in the Toronto Star is always cause for serious concern.

I’ve also told you that in setting out standards on plagiarism, the newsroom journalistic standards guide states that “the Star does not present other media’s reporting as its own or publish unattributed material from other sources.”

Last week, the Star published a note telling readers that an Aug. 3 article about the vanity licence plates rejected by the Ontario government incorrectly contained six paragraphs that were plagiarized “in form and substance” from the work of another Star journalist who wrote about censored vanity licence plates in October 2010.

In recent days I’ve heard from several journalism professors, as well as reporters, columnists and editors from the Star and other news organizations, all seeking answers to the same questions: What’s up with that plagiarism correction? Can’t Star reporters take material from the Star’s own archives?

Sometimes, yes. But this was not a matter of grabbing a couple of paragraphs of background information from the Star’s archives, as I expect every journalist here has done. This was indeed a clear case of plagiarism. Here’s what happened. Star summer intern and data/photo journalist Marc Ellison pitched his editors on a data journalism project that included creating a searchable database of banned licence plates and writing a story based on the data.

In writing his story, Ellison copied the gist of a creative and clever “lead” — the opening sentence that journalists put much effort into crafting to grab readers and compel them to read on — and several other paragraphs written by Star reporter Daniel Dale three years ago.

Ellison’s plagiarized material also included a statement Dale had obtained from the Ontario Transportation Ministry defending its decisions on vanity plates. Ellison repeated that statement word-forword without making clear it was a response given three years ago.

When Dale read Ellison’s story he pointed out the strong similarities to his previous work on that same topic to City Editor Irene Gentle. Dale told me he was “mostly bewildered” on reading Ellison’s piece.

“I’m not dead, I still work for the Star, and Marc had told me he was doing the story, yet he seemed to assume that I wouldn’t notice that he’d copied my work, which remains puzzling to me.”

Gentle quickly concluded this was an egregious example of plagiarism. As she told Ellison in a follow-up email:

“Sometimes cutting and pasting a boilerplate graph from previous Star stories is OK — such as a legally risky graph that needs to be repeated in a series of stories. Also, sometimes there are only so many ways to write a basic and oft-written fact.

“However, largely cutting and pasting from a previous story is not acceptable practice. It is still plagiarism, even from our own archives and a fellow Star reporter.”

Ellison, a former IT worker and recent journalism school grad who stood out in the Star’s newsroom for the innovative and enterprising data journalism projects he did during his 10-week internship, took immediate responsibility for his “regrettable lapse in judgment.”

Undoubtedly, Ellison has learned from this unfortunate mistake. He apologized to Gentle and to Editor Michael Cooke for disappointing the Star and its readers and told me, “I’m sorry to have not only embarrassed the Star, but also to have drawn upon the work of Daniel in this manner.”

As is the Star’s practice whenever any plagiarism comes to light, we have examined much of Ellison’s reporting from his summer stint and found no other problems. He is no longer with the Star, as he’d planned from the outset of his internship.

A talented young journalist who brought important new data journalism skills to the newsroom, Ellison did not make any excuses for what he deems now to be “frankly inexcusable.” But he did tell us that the mistake occurred when he was working quickly to turn around data from a freedom of information request into a searchable database and story on a tight deadline.

He said he felt rushed to comb through the data and produce a story quickly, with less time than he’d had for other data projects.

At a time when newsrooms throughout North America must do more with less and are looking to those savvy digital journalists who bring new data and video skills to tell stories in new ways on many platforms, this gives pause for concern.

Certainly all of these new skills are vital to the critical reinvention of journalism for a digital era. But in reinventing ourselves and asking more of all journalists, we must ensure that no journalist loses sight of journalism’s most basic ethical standards. publiced@thestar.ca