To Catch A Plagiarist

Journalists often talk and write about how bad it is, which makes me wonder why we find it acceptable to do almost nothing to prevent it? The general attitude towards plagiarism checking seems to be, “Let’s save our money and let readers and other people catch the culprits.”

This comes from Craig Silverman at the Columbia Journalism Review. He’s right about one thing: Every time a journalistic plagiarist is outed, news critics and pundits get up in arms about plagiarism for a few weeks before letting the issue blow over.

I don’t like the idea of running everything a newspaper produces through a plagiarism-detecting algorithm, but there’s got to be something else we can do to keep journos honest.

My suggestion: Open up the journalistic process to public scrutiny. Encourage reporters to keep blogs where they chronicle their research. Some people call this “showing your work,” just like back in high school algebra. If everything we do is out there for the public to see, we’ll have an incentive to stay honest, and we might just earn back some of the trust that people seem to have lost in journalists over the past few decades.