The article “Battles rage in St. Petersburg over Kerouac legacy” published in the Nov. 9 issue of The Crow’s Nest included text copied directly from several published articles.
Whole paragraphs were copied without proper citation or attribution from articles in The St. Petersburg Times (“The fight over all things Kerouac,” Nov. 24, 2002; “Pinellas judge rules will for Jack Kerouac’s estate is a forgery,” July 28, 2009), The New York Times (“Kerouac at the end of the road,” May 29, 1988; the Time’s 1969 obituary for Kerouac), and Fine Books & Collections (“And the beat goes on,” January 2010).
Doug Bennett, assistant metro editor at The St. Petersburg Times, contacted The Crow’s Nest about the “apparent plagiarism” of the 2002 St. Petersburg Times story in the Nov. 9 article written by a contributing writer.
After further inspection of the article, including running it through plagiarism detection software, The Crow’s Nest determined that the article had been plagiarized, and that the writer, a USFSP student, had taken substantial paragraphs from the articles named above.
We have removed the article from The Crow’s Nest website. Professors from the writer’s academic department, Florida studies, have been notified of the situation.
Journalism involves trust. Readers trust that the writer of a published story has done his or her homework—that the piece has been fully researched, and that the information presented is factual and properly cited so the reader can make informed decisions about the information.
Plagiarism breaks that trust, and can do so in several ways. In this case, about eight whole paragraphs were copied directly from other sources, word for word. At its most basic, plagiarism is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own: use (another’s production) without crediting the source.”
In the modern Internet age of copy and paste, incorporating another’s ideas into one’s own work is easy, widespread and to some, the norm. A professor at Rutgers University conducted a study from 2006 to 2010 finding that “29 percent of college undergraduates believe copying from the Web is ‘serious’ cheating,” according to a Sept. 15, 2010 article in The Cap Times in Wisconsin. Cheating on a class assignment is bad. Cheating the public out of the truth is unacceptable.
The Crow’s Nest has a small paid staff, and as such, we accept submissions from volunteer contributing writers. Some of these writers attend all weekly staff meetings and submit articles on a regular basis. Some of these writers submit a story once, via email, and do not contribute further, like the writer of the Kerouac piece.
The Crow’s Nest editorial guidelines, which may be found on the paper’s website at crowsneststpete.com under the “About” tab, explicitly state that plagiarism of any kind is unacceptable in the pages—printed or Web—of the campus newspaper. The guidelines also state, “Contributing writers, photographers, correspondents and editors are also expected to uphold the standards of ethical journalism in work submitted to The Crow’s Nest.”
Contributing writers come in and out through out the semester, and while these guidelines were given to those who attended the first few meetings of the semester, contributors submitting stories a few weeks into the semester did not receive copies of these guidelines.
All Crow’s Nest contributors will now be required to receive and read copies of these guidelines prior to having an article published in the paper, whether they submit stories every week or email a story in once.
As journalists we seek the truth. The Crow’s Nest looks upon the university with a critical eye, and that includes this newspaper. We will do better, striving to uphold the highest standards of journalism and well-researched, truthful articles to the university community.
Hello:
Wouldn’t it be easier to run”plagiarism detection software” on all articles submitted? perhaps it can be automated.