BY STEVE SAFRAN
MANAGING EDITOR
LOST REMOTE
When you’ve been in journalism for a while (about six months is the average) you start to realize it’s really hard. Seriously hard. Facts are difficult to come by. Good pictures are hard to snap. Nobody will talk with you, except maybe that creepy intern. Scoops – real scoops – are scooped by the web. And who wants to learn the web anyway?
The good news is that life is a whole lot easier for those who want it to be. Digital media tools can have that column of yours finished in about 20 minutes, complete with a photo and even (stock) video. (We suggest color for any story after about 1969.)
For starters: Photoshopping is no longer for Farkers anymore. Once the domain of amateurs trying to put themselves in pictures with Drew Curtis, a squirrel (you know the one) and a guy holding mustard, it is now a professional tool. Not content with an Israeli plane merely dropping flares? Add a couple of missiles, clone the flare and you’ve got yourself a vicious attack by an uncaring, faceless enemy! Now that’s a picture any professional news organization will buy, without question. And without questioning, too.
Don’t like the look of the smoky aftermath of an attack on a neighborhood in Beirut? Clone that smoke! Never mind that smoke emits in a random, chaotic, non-repeating pattern. Just repeat the same circle of smoke over and over. Clone a building, too. All those Middle Eastern buildings look alike. Maybe clone some Middle Easterners while you’re at it.
2005 was an excellent year for word theft. The corrections website “Regret The Error†(didn’t they steal that from somewhere?) lists some of the more brazen examples:
– In December (a) New York Times reporter … “inadvertently” plagiarized two paragraphs of an article from Travel + Leisure magazine.
– In February, a (local) sports writer was “sent home†from covering the Super Bowl after he plagiarized some of his column from an article in Sports Illustrated
Seriously — that’s genius. This raises the bar for all of us. Stealing from some crappy, obscure paper? You’ll probably get away passing off someone’s hard work as your own, and more power to ya. But stealing from “Sports Illustrated?†Covering the Super Bowl? Ballsy. How am I to top that? Even “inadvertently?â€
Perhaps the most encouraging sign of “the liberation of other people’s enslaved speech†comes to us from Jackson, Mississippi. I’ll give you the lead from the Associated Press article of some date that was probably Monday, Aug 7., 2006 that a guy named HOLBROOK MOHR wrote. (Hope Holbrook’s a guy.) : “A freelance food columnist for Mississippi’s largest newspaper has been accused of plagiarizing a story about fried green tomatoes, and The Clarion-Ledger said the writer’s work will no longer appear in its pages.â€
Did you hear there was a plagiarism conference this year? There was. But they stole the idea from last year’s. Ha! No — really — there was one. It was in the UK in June. And again a week later. I’ll stop now. There is a joke in it being the SECOND International Plagiarism Conference, but so help me I don’t want them comparing my college papers to a certain classmate who was very pretty.
Here’s the best and most poetic: someone is stealing from me. Right now. Probably this column. I’m not going to link to it, but some piece of slime is scraping my work and putting it on a splog so they can make money off the ads. I am appealing to these people: if you find a way to make money off my work, for the love of GOD please tell me. I will let you keep every penny you generate.
While I admire the ingenuity and sheer stupidity of thinking my writing will bring in traffic, I’m still annoyed. After all, what if he gets the babes that were meant for me?
That reminds me, I should Photoshop a better-looking picture of me. Maybe handing out food to war orphans. At the Super Bowl.