Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Copy and Paste

I came across this article in the Columbia Journalism Review that related to today's discussion on ethics and how to stay out of trouble when reporting. This article in particular covers the topic of plagiarism with the 2010 nonfiction book A Sea in Flames.

Colorado editor Amanda Mascarelli was reviewing the work before it was put on shelves nationwide and found various quotes from an article written the year prior in Nature magazine.

This article got me thinking whether or not this was an act of plagiarism. On one hand, there were several quotes that were obviously recognizable from the article published in Nature but on the other hand, the author was using a news story to incorporate how reporters interpret oil spills. I would love to hear your opinion on this topic seeing that we just discussed this recently in class and is very relevant to our curriculum.

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