What We’re Planning to Discuss on 8/5

There’s been plenty of feathers flying over the recent kerfluffle between Washington Post reporter, Ian Shapira and Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, in which Mr. Shapira accused Mr. Nolan of “ripping off his newspaper story.”

Mr. Shapira published this piece to provide a graph by graph analysis of how the Gawker story failed to correctly attribute the origin of his work.

An excerpt: Gawker’s version of my story, headlined ” ‘Generational Consultant’ Holds America’s Fakest Job,” begins by telling its readers to “Meet Anne Loehr” — with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: “Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya.” That’s information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes. – Ian Shapira

You’ll find the whole Gawker article here.

The ensuing conversation/debate on Twitter included comments from:
Mathew Ingram, Communities Editor of the Globe and Mail – nice of you to be scrupulously fair, but calling the Gawker post a “rip-off” and the “death of journalism” isn’t reasonable.

Jim Brady US Consulting Editor, The Guardian; Former Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com – I like Ian Shapira, but dont get his piece: So, a few thousand people encountered something you wrote who might not have otherwise? Great!

Gawker chief Nick Denton said Shapira’s piece on the appropriation of his work by Gawker was eminently reasonable. Fanatical bloggers should chill. http://bit.ly/OrT3x

Even Time Magazine’s James Poniewozik weighed in with Gawker vs. The Washington Post: When Does Linking Become Larceny?.

In the midst of all this, Mashable reported the AP would now charge $12.50 for a five word quote (costs go up from there based on amount of words selected) of its original reporting.

So we’re wondering:

Do new basic guidelines need to be established that are applicable to all news organizations, bloggers, tweeters, etc. to ensure proper attribution?

If so, who is going to draft them? Who will be the police?

Book publishers and authors, in light of Stephanie Meyer being accused of plagiarism, should filters be set in place to ensure that manuscripts aren’t appropriating ideas or actual writing?

We’ll chat about these questions and more tonight at 8:30pm EST.