Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

As the World Wide Web has grown and expanded, it has become an increasingly important source of news for people across the globe. In fact, according to a poll conducted by Zogby International, published in early 2008, “nearly half of respondents (48%) said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from 40% who said the same a year ago.” Many of the internet’s news outlets are expansions of well-known, trusted television sources — CNN, NBC, and the BBC, just to name a few. However, the web has spawned thousands of other news sources that acquire their information in a more indirect fashion.

As Judy Muller describes them in her article “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web,” these websites are secondary news sources. They exist as an aggregate of news from a variety of sources, thereby profiting (or at least maintaining themselves and achieving steady traffic flow) by feeding off the work of others.

Because the internet is still “young” in terms of its development, establishing real-world rules concerning legality and copyright issues is difficult — and enforcing those rules is even tougher. In “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web,” originally published in the magazine Nieman Reports in Winter 2006, Judy Muller examines the issue of plagiarism on the web and the way in which it affects individual journalists and the field of journalism as a whole.

Muller’s article begins with a long story about a group of journalism graduate students, after a brief introduction explaining the article’s thesis — the dangers of sites “repurposing” content, a form of internet plagiarism. Muller’s story immediately sets the tone for the entire article by introducing a human concept to the story. Like many journalists, she injects a human element into her writing to help convey her message. This sets the story apart from a more traditional essay approach. Rather than stating a main idea and then backing it up with facts, figures, and citations, Muller influences our opinion with a personal story about how the problem she is addressing influenced a group of real people. This method will make her message especially influential when read by anyone who could potentially be affected by internet plagiarism or was in the past.

Muller writes that “the problem with repurposing is that it is open to interpretation by various outlaws roaming the World Wild West.” She cites two different websites as examples of secondary news sources. The first, Yahoo! News, she praises, because it “always credits the original reporters and often links back to the original source material.” It is with the second, Buzzle.com, that the problem, and focus of Muller’s article, lies.

Muller’s graduate students spent a summer developing a story about the lives of teenagers in towns bordering the Mexican-American border. Their work resulted in a story being published in L.A. Weekly and a broadcast piece making it onto Good Morning America. When the students were tipped off by a Border Patrol agent they’d interviewed that information from their story had been published on Buzzle.com with no attributions, they were understandably upset. Buzzle had pulled quotes from the L.A. Weekly article and used an image that had no correlation to the story itself. The article was also attributed to Buzzle’s “reporting staff.”

Buzzle was quick to fix their mistake when confronted, and claimed that “although we stand by our author and assert that no plagiarism took place, the fact that there was even a question indicates that we failed in properly demonstrating our sources.” This statement is the one Muller bases her argument on. Buzzle’s stance brings into question what plagiarism really is on the net. Muller argues that the rise of terms like “repurposing” and the existence of sites that exist as “Secondary content sources,” as Buzzle claims to be, have changed our definition of what plagiarism really is, as well as how we deal with it.

Because of the style Muller chose to use to convey her message, the entirety of her claim is based on the incident with Buzzle.com. At the beginning of the article she states that Yahoo! News is a reliable secondary content source that acknowledges the sources it gathers information from. Because the students only have an issue with Buzzle, we are given no real sense of the scope of the problem of plagiarism on the web. Are there lots of secondary news sites that fail to cite where they get their information? Or, worse, do they misappropriate text or images in such a way as to skew the original author’s work?

Muller’s article leaves us with more questions than answers. As a piece of scholarly writing, it is very effective in making us think about the problem of plagiarism. It establishes the problem exists with factual evidence in the form of a real situation encountered by her students. She also (jokingly) proposes a solution — an “E-Posse” to run the plagiarizers off the net. This suggested solution does little more than reinforce Muller’s opinion that plagiarism on the net is a problem.

Judy Muller successfully makes us consider the issue. Whether or not we take the next step — doing our own research and finding sites that back up or challenge her assertion — is left up to the individual reader. By providing more examples and citing more sources, Muller could have made “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web?” a challenging piece instead of a thoughtful one. Still, the article fits into the general schema of journalistic writing present in Harvard’s Nieman Reports. The magazine is written by prestigious journalists and professors and typically deals with social issues and the ways in which they affect and are affected by the journalism industry. “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web” is a good springboard for further study on how the journalism industry has been changed by secondary content sources on the web.

In my personal web experience, I rarely come across a secondary content source that has irresponsibly handled its source material. A great many sites I’ve visited or contributed to in the past rely on other websites to collect information firsthand. The secondary news sites then take that information, rewrite it, and provide a link to the original source of the news or information. Because I haven’t seen the practice Muller warns about as a rampant problem, it’s hard for me to take the article at face value, but it absolutely makes me curious to find out just how often this truly occurs.

Works Cited

Muller, Judy. “Plagiarism Goes by a Different Name on the Web.” Nieman Reports 60.4 (Winter2006 2006): 84-85. Communication & Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, GA. 18 Aug. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

“Zogby Poll: 67% View Traditional Journalism as “Out of Touch” Zogby International. 5 October 2008. < http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1454>