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Can someone explain what the difference between this and pulling stuff off the AP machine is? I see almost identical news articles all the time across major new

by jjcon 5y ago

Can someone explain what the difference between this and pulling stuff off the AP machine is? I see almost identical news articles all the time across major news outlets. My partner used to work at a company and would write all their news, spotlights and press releases. They commonly would see paragraphs taken by major news outlets without attribution. She tells me that’s just how it was. I’m not in the industry but I thought copying from press releases and AP/Reuters sources was fairly standard. I’m sure there is a lot more to it here but I’m asking what the distinction is. Certainly I feel like plagiarism in the news isn’t quite the same as it is elsewhere.

jaywalk 5y ago
Where are you seeing that he copied from press releases? The article says "material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times." That is very different from press releases.
DFHippie 5y ago
I take it these weren't press releases. They were articles published by other journalists under a byline. When you issue a press release, you have particular information you want other journalists to pick up and spread. Attribution doesn't matter to you. If you are a journalist, you want to be credited. This is your bread and butter. Whoever is plagiarizing you is stealing your work.
- jjcon 5y ago
  And what about AP and Reuters?
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    I was only addressing press releases. I don't know about wire services. It's my understanding that publishing them as your own, or implicitly your own because of a lack of attribution, is just plagiarism.
    - lazide 5y ago
      If they pay the requisite fee it is licensed to them to do that, that is the wire services business model. It isn’t plagiarism if you pay for it and it’s done with the writers permission apparently.
      - technothrasher 5y ago
        I don't remember what our license agreement was exactly, but back when I was in school I did a weekly morning news slot on the school's FM station. I would take all my stories from the AP wire, and the rule was that I always had to start my segment with, "and now some of the top stories from the AP..." or similar.
      - justin66 5y ago
        >> It's my understanding that publishing them as your own, or implicitly your own because of a lack of attribution, is just plagiarism. > If they pay the requisite fee it is licensed to them to do that, that is the wire services business model. Licensees are required to attribute AP-sourced content to AP.
  - danso 5y ago
    AP and Reuters are wire services, and other news orgs pay a large fee to syndicate their content
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      My local paper dropped AP, but now runs CNN as their primary source. It has been… pretty obvious.
  - jethro_tell 5y ago
    Back when we had small town journalism, you'd get AP or Reuters as a service to be your world/national news department. The service was that they would give you a whole news department and you could copy paste the article and have your tiny news room writing about the basketball win and the bake sale. That was the deal, but it's a subscription service for one. Secondly, the AP or Reuters got the by line in your paper. Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline
    - goatforce5 5y ago
      I think it's fairly common to take a wire article and change/update it with original reporting. For example, the current main article on The Guardian's website is: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-four-more-provincial-capitals-in-afghanistan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-... which has a byline of: "Luke Harding and agencies"
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Oh, Luke Harding. His journalistic ethics are very much open to question. This is the guy that published a book containing the secret password to Assange's encrypted document dump. While he was supposedly cooperating with Assange on behalf of the Guardian.
    - justin66 5y ago
      > Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline This has never been how AP works. Where are you even getting this stuff? AP traditionally provides stories in an "inverted pyramid" [0] structure, such that an outlet can use as much or as little of the story as they need to fill a given space on the page. They're free to modify the text as much as they want to. Such an article will list the Associated Press and whatever journalists edited, contributed, or otherwise mangled the original article. My (least) favorite modern example of this is when the Fox News website takes an AP article that makes the Republican party look bad and adds or subtracts to it until it's less damaging. The people responsible for that mangling are listed as contributors to such an article, as is the AP. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
namdnay 5y ago
Media orgs will have a commercial deal with AP or Reuters that lets them more or less cut and paste whatever they want. Here the guy got lazy and started copying filler from media without any agreement I don’t see how it puts into question any fact checking though - the guy was just taking shortcuts to build articles, by plagiarising reliable journalists
- ruined 5y ago
  it puts it into question because plagiarism like this is generally seen as unethical, and if you can prove someone did a significantly unethical thing, everything else they do can be put under scrutiny
- sbuttgereit 5y ago
  Snopes is fundamentally trafficking in "trust". People refer to them with the question if something heard or seen should be trusted. Plagiarism is fundamentally a violation of trust: it represents work as original when it is not. If trust is violated in the production of the work, why would you believe that the facts presented are themselves trustworthy? Even if the plagiarist doesn't desire to mislead factually, they've already taken shady shortcuts to save some time... why wouldn't they also take shortcuts on diligence or verification? The problem is once trust is lost, you can't take for granted any measure of reliability given that trust verification is their product.
- meowface 5y ago
  It doesn't disprove any fact-checking articles, but, as a hypothetical example, imagine if you learned a fact-checker was convicted of writing lots of bad checks. They might be perfectly honest in other areas of their life, but it creates a lot more skepticism, since you know they're willing to be dishonest in that one case. Plagiarism isn't necessarily as dishonest as financial fraud, but it's still a form of dishonesty and likely also intellectual laziness. Dishonesty and intellectual laziness are the opposites of what you want in a credible debunker/verifier, no matter the relevance or severity.
danso 5y ago
Reprinting and attributing is allowed. Copying and not attributing it isn’t, because besides the whole theft aspect, it implies that you yourself observed or researched the given assertions.
- soheil 5y ago
  I don't think attribution is as necessary as you make it sound like at least when it comes to AP/Reuters stories used by news orgs that are in partnership with them.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    Generally you'll see that when an article is simply copied from AP or Reuters, it's credited that way; if it's used as a source or being rewritten, it'll be credited with a phrase something like "Wire stories from Reuters were used in this report".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paulpauper 5y ago
false attribution is worse than no attribution He was taking ownership of work which was not his and profiting from it with ads and facebook traffic.
jcrawfordor 5y ago
News organizations that use wire services have contracts with those services that dictate how they use their articles. Often they contract the wire agencies for only certain type of content, and the price depends on how many categories and how in depth of content they want (e.g. full articles cost more than ticker lines). The details can vary, but usually articles ran verbatim are attributed to the agency, while articles that are merely based on articles from the agency are not attributed to the agency (in part to protect the agency in case the article turns out to be incorrect or etc.) but instead include a note at the end that they use content from the agency. For articles run directly, it's part of the nature of those agencies and their contracts with their writers that the byline goes to the agency rather than the original writer (which is often multiple people anyway). This attribution is so common that back when newspapers were set in lead, and still sometimes today, a special ligature was used for AP, and sometimes for UPI and AFP as well. Newspapers also sometimes run content directly from other newspapers, in which case the byline will list the author and original paper---and this is done under a contract with the other paper, either money changes hands or sometimes it's a mutual sharing agreement.

by jjcon 5y ago

jaywalk 5y ago

Where are you seeing that he copied from press releases? The article says "material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times." That is very different from press releases.

DFHippie 5y ago

I take it these weren't press releases. They were articles published by other journalists under a byline. When you issue a press release, you have particular information you want other journalists to pick up and spread. Attribution doesn't matter to you. If you are a journalist, you want to be credited. This is your bread and butter. Whoever is plagiarizing you is stealing your work.

jjcon 5y ago
And what about AP and Reuters?
- DFHippie 5y ago
  I was only addressing press releases. I don't know about wire services. It's my understanding that publishing them as your own, or implicitly your own because of a lack of attribution, is just plagiarism.
  - lazide 5y ago
    If they pay the requisite fee it is licensed to them to do that, that is the wire services business model. It isn’t plagiarism if you pay for it and it’s done with the writers permission apparently.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      I don't remember what our license agreement was exactly, but back when I was in school I did a weekly morning news slot on the school's FM station. I would take all my stories from the AP wire, and the rule was that I always had to start my segment with, "and now some of the top stories from the AP..." or similar.
    - justin66 5y ago
      >> It's my understanding that publishing them as your own, or implicitly your own because of a lack of attribution, is just plagiarism. > If they pay the requisite fee it is licensed to them to do that, that is the wire services business model. Licensees are required to attribute AP-sourced content to AP.
- danso 5y ago
  AP and Reuters are wire services, and other news orgs pay a large fee to syndicate their content
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    My local paper dropped AP, but now runs CNN as their primary source. It has been… pretty obvious.
- jethro_tell 5y ago
  Back when we had small town journalism, you'd get AP or Reuters as a service to be your world/national news department. The service was that they would give you a whole news department and you could copy paste the article and have your tiny news room writing about the basketball win and the bake sale. That was the deal, but it's a subscription service for one. Secondly, the AP or Reuters got the by line in your paper. Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline
  - goatforce5 5y ago
    I think it's fairly common to take a wire article and change/update it with original reporting. For example, the current main article on The Guardian's website is: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-four-more-provincial-capitals-in-afghanistan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-... which has a byline of: "Luke Harding and agencies"
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Oh, Luke Harding. His journalistic ethics are very much open to question. This is the guy that published a book containing the secret password to Assange's encrypted document dump. While he was supposedly cooperating with Assange on behalf of the Guardian.
  - justin66 5y ago
    > Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline This has never been how AP works. Where are you even getting this stuff? AP traditionally provides stories in an "inverted pyramid" [0] structure, such that an outlet can use as much or as little of the story as they need to fill a given space on the page. They're free to modify the text as much as they want to. Such an article will list the Associated Press and whatever journalists edited, contributed, or otherwise mangled the original article. My (least) favorite modern example of this is when the Fox News website takes an AP article that makes the Republican party look bad and adds or subtracts to it until it's less damaging. The people responsible for that mangling are listed as contributors to such an article, as is the AP. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

namdnay 5y ago

Media orgs will have a commercial deal with AP or Reuters that lets them more or less cut and paste whatever they want. Here the guy got lazy and started copying filler from media without any agreement I don’t see how it puts into question any fact checking though - the guy was just taking shortcuts to build articles, by plagiarising reliable journalists

ruined 5y ago
it puts it into question because plagiarism like this is generally seen as unethical, and if you can prove someone did a significantly unethical thing, everything else they do can be put under scrutiny
sbuttgereit 5y ago
Snopes is fundamentally trafficking in "trust". People refer to them with the question if something heard or seen should be trusted. Plagiarism is fundamentally a violation of trust: it represents work as original when it is not. If trust is violated in the production of the work, why would you believe that the facts presented are themselves trustworthy? Even if the plagiarist doesn't desire to mislead factually, they've already taken shady shortcuts to save some time... why wouldn't they also take shortcuts on diligence or verification? The problem is once trust is lost, you can't take for granted any measure of reliability given that trust verification is their product.
meowface 5y ago
It doesn't disprove any fact-checking articles, but, as a hypothetical example, imagine if you learned a fact-checker was convicted of writing lots of bad checks. They might be perfectly honest in other areas of their life, but it creates a lot more skepticism, since you know they're willing to be dishonest in that one case. Plagiarism isn't necessarily as dishonest as financial fraud, but it's still a form of dishonesty and likely also intellectual laziness. Dishonesty and intellectual laziness are the opposites of what you want in a credible debunker/verifier, no matter the relevance or severity.

danso 5y ago

Reprinting and attributing is allowed. Copying and not attributing it isn’t, because besides the whole theft aspect, it implies that you yourself observed or researched the given assertions.

soheil 5y ago
I don't think attribution is as necessary as you make it sound like at least when it comes to AP/Reuters stories used by news orgs that are in partnership with them.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Generally you'll see that when an article is simply copied from AP or Reuters, it's credited that way; if it's used as a source or being rewritten, it'll be credited with a phrase something like "Wire stories from Reuters were used in this report".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paulpauper 5y ago

false attribution is worse than no attribution He was taking ownership of work which was not his and profiting from it with ads and facebook traffic.

jcrawfordor 5y ago

News organizations that use wire services have contracts with those services that dictate how they use their articles. Often they contract the wire agencies for only certain type of content, and the price depends on how many categories and how in depth of content they want (e.g. full articles cost more than ticker lines). The details can vary, but usually articles ran verbatim are attributed to the agency, while articles that are merely based on articles from the agency are not attributed to the agency (in part to protect the agency in case the article turns out to be incorrect or etc.) but instead include a note at the end that they use content from the agency. For articles run directly, it's part of the nature of those agencies and their contracts with their writers that the byline goes to the agency rather than the original writer (which is often multiple people anyway). This attribution is so common that back when newspapers were set in lead, and still sometimes today, a special ligature was used for AP, and sometimes for UPI and AFP as well. Newspapers also sometimes run content directly from other newspapers, in which case the byline will list the author and original paper---and this is done under a contract with the other paper, either money changes hands or sometimes it's a mutual sharing agreement.