Ron Borges - Plagiarist?

I agree that two months is a gift from The Globe, but there are a lot of writers out there, whose suspensions are not publicized and they're very quietly back on the job in a few weeks or a month or two...

A guy I used to work with got a month for a plagiarism issue and only a few people on staff even knew what was going on... Of course, this was in the days before blogs and Jayson Blair...

 

I used to be the editor-in-chief at Pro Football Weekly, and Ron Borges was a columnist for our publication at the time so I thought I'd chime in on this subject. I considered Ron to be a talented, insightful and very valuable contributor to our publication. I enjoyed his writing style, thought his arguments were well thought out (even when I disagreed with him) and felt he hit the timely subjects. I thought our publication was better for having him. I'm not going to comment on his current troubles since I'm not even remotely in the loop on this. But I will say this regarding those who are quick to say he should automatically be fired. If I were the sports editor at the Boston Globe, I would not consider firing to be an automatic option. If plagiarism was in fact what happened here, it is a very serious journalistic offense that should be punished. Two months without pay and a very public and humiliating lashing is a significant punishment (especially the latter). But if you have an employee who you value, I think you have conversations in which you determine if you feel the lesson has been learned and it won't happen again. People make mistakes be it in sports (think of all the second, third and fourth chances athletes get), corporate America, your family, etc. Given how long Ron has been with the Globe and how distinguished his career has been, I think his paper should view him as "part of the family." And when a family member screws up, I don't think your first response is "off with their head." As long as a person in this situation acknowledges what they did was wrong, gives assurances it won't happen again and realizes there will be zero tolerance for this sort of behavior moving forward, I don't think it is unreasonable for a publication to stand by their employee. Firing him is the easy way out. It quiets the PR backlash. It's politically correct. And in many cases, it might be the appropriate action. But I also think that being loyal to a long-time, valuable employee during a trying time is a reasonable approach in some circumstances.

Ron Pollack

 

Being of roughly Ron’s generation in the business and having some history with pro beat notes networks, I wanted to offer a historical perspective that might make this seem a little less black-and-white to some of you. Putting myself into the shoes of a 30-year-old who has known only the Internet age, I can see where this would look like an obvious, purposeful ethical breach. In fact, I want to make the case that what Ron did – with a single, important but mechanical exception – is what many pro beat writers did for years with the full approval of their employers.

I was part of several incarnations of NFL and NBA notes networks. They began as telephone conference calls in which writers would read aloud – or, often, just talk about – the top three or four weekly stories associated with the teams they covered. Between bad connections, misunderstandings, mistaken transcriptions and ambiguities between what was a quote and what was a writer’s commentary, this process produced hellaciously approximate versions of notes and quotes, but there was not much of an Internet yet, so, in the main, each market’s notes were confined to that market and nobody knew any better. (Although some towns had writers on competing notes networks at competing papers who could produce remarkably different versions of the same stories and quotes.)

Newspaper managements encouraged the formalization of these notes networks because the participation of the originating reporters represented an implicit consent for the other participants to use their material; management thought this took care of the copyright issues.

My job at the time was to cover the Denver Broncos or Nuggets. I had a working knowledge of the rest of their leagues, but covering the local team was a fulltime gig, requiring daily attendance, travel, etc. Producing a weekly, full-page NFL or NBA notes package was also part of the job. A few of the biggest papers had national beat writers who traveled around and developed their own national stuff, but we didn’t, and the vast majority of metropolitan newspapers with league-wide notes columns didn’t, either.

The notes column was the bane of my existence. It was essentially a clerical task, often accomplished on the run, in airports, in the back of cabs, pre-game on press row, assembling, putting in order and writing transitions (or not) for all this material provided by my fellow scribes. Management at all these papers was very aware of this process; it had to pay the fee for the conference calls and the computer notes exchanges that evolved from them. The advent of written notes exchanges actually improved the accuracy of the material exchanged by eliminating the vagaries of oral transmission. Requisite off-color joke here.

(cont.)

 

(cont.)

Once the exchanges went e-mail, the mechanical process of assembling a league-wide notes column – at least, mine – was to cut and paste all the good stuff into a Word file and then work through it, rewriting, stringing quotes, coming up with snappy little sub-heads. The mistake Ron made, obviously, was in not rewriting, or not rewriting sufficiently. But I want to emphasize that the difference between rewriting sufficiently and rewriting insufficiently, from a substantive ethical point of view, is the difference between successfully disguising and unsuccessfully disguising your reliance on somebody else’s stuff. This is often an exercise in replacing “consecutive” with “in a row,” reversing the order of relevant numbers, changing an adjective or characterization to something similar in meaning but different in sound or rhythm. One of the most valuable tools in this process is the Thesauras function in Word. Occasionally, you might add an opinion or a crack – oddly, these cracks, frowned upon at the time, turn into redeeming, distinguishing characteristics in retrospect – but not often. These were supposed to be “informational” columns, not “opinion” columns. So the rewrite often had has its only purpose to distinguish your note superficially from the note upon which it was based. Rewrapped or not, the guts of the thing were somebody else’s stuff. That was the whole point of the exchange.

I emphasize again that this process was approved by the managements of all the papers that participated, for which it was a cheap way to produce what appeared to be a locally-generated national notes column. I should also point out that for years, strict attribution was frowned upon by editors, who thought it slowed down and burdened copy that was otherwise supposed to be “light and breezy.” For management to be shocked today at these networks or their products is a Claude Renault moment.

(I should also note that under the umbrella of the wire services, which had permission through contracts with clients to use stuff from any client and share it with any client without attribution, journalists were often asked back in the day to rip and consolidate news briefs from all over the place without attribution to the original publications. The wire service contracts provided an important legal shield for this practice – like the implied consent of the notes network – but it also helped to establish a journalistic habit of ripping, consolidating and not attributing. The legal niceties were not often explained.)

It used to be perfectly permissible in national notes columns to reprint quotes that appeared elsewhere without crediting the original source. The catch-all “Material from other newspapers was used in compiling this column” at the end was considered sufficient. Evolving, stricter standards of attribution have come with the Internet age. Clearly, they are a good thing. Whether the national notes column is even necessary anymore is a conversation worth having, and I think I know which way most of the beat folks would vote. Those of us who grew up in the business under previous standards obviously have an obligation to keep up. But perhaps an understanding of where the business has been on these issues will soften the judgments on people caught between the evolving edicts of their own managements. In my opinion, this is nothing at all like what Mike Barnicle was accused of – making stuff up. The mistake that Ron Borges made, in my opinion, was not in the ethical decision to make use of another journalist’s material. That is the very basis of the column he was assigned to produce. His mistake was in failing to make use of modern journalistic convention in disguising this very common practice.

 

Boots: According to my understanding, he qualifies as African-American -- or at least as a person of color. He was a minority hire at the Globe back in the 1980s.

He is Portuguese, but is from one its autonomous regions, Madeira, which is close enough to Africa to qualify him as a minority hire.

I do not know this first-hand, but it was widely discussed when he started covering the Patriots.

Personally, I don't think any of it matters. He was caught with his hands still in the till. He should be gone. But that's my opinion.

 

Dave -- All of which, I suspect, is why he was suspended and not fired.

 

Yeah, Dave, I think this falls into the same category as when the San Francisco Chronicle suspended someone over one of those daily compilations of humorous sports items a few years ago. You would have to be retarded to think the compiler had actually done the legwork on every item; obviously almost everything comes off the wire. But if you fail to either attribute or rewrite, you are just leaving yourself open to claims of plagiarism.

I think the notes columns have outlived their usefulness. If the desk has done its job, most of the best items from that week have already been in the paper when they happened.

 

Two other journalism issues: I'm bumping back my question about what the Globe would have done if this was in-season. It's one thing to replace a reporter like Snow during the last Sox season, but a columnist seems like it would be much more of a challenge.

And second, isn't Borges known for being something of a know-it-all and thinking his opinion is gospel? How will he have any credibility? I know he is not well-liked for his endless agenda against Belichick, so I think he's lost most of his support from readers with this. And how does he go back to the Patriots to work? I'm sure he's not their favorite writer as it is, but wouldn't this give them an excuse to dismiss him (not literally, I know obv. they don't have any say in who covers them) now that his credibility has been shot.

 

It would be a big hit, but they'd probably just move someone like Ryan from GA columnist to more of a Patriots-centric columnist. If it means fewer columns on Celtics training camp or BC football, so be it. Can't imagine them bumping Reiss up to columnist duty; he's so effective working his team sources that it seems counterproductive for him to be in an analyze-and-opine role.

 

i don't see a credibility problem for ron. he didn't make stuff up. his facts were good. seems to me he can recover from this hit.

then again, he's a buddy. so maybe i'm too close to make that call. it's a worthwhile discussion.

 

I just feel like with him already not having a good relationship with the Patriots, this will certainly hurt him. It's not that I'd expect the players and coaches to really understand exactly what happened with this situation, but I do think they all know what plagiarism is. I actually think this type of thing would be worse for a columnist than a beat writer in terms of how your credibility is viewed by your subjects. A beat writer isn't passing judgement on these people everyday, so I think players would forget about it sooner because if they even read your stuff afterwards, they're probably not going to find anything that would bother them. But with a columnist criticizing coaches and players (frequently in Borges' case) you would think they could easily respond with "F--- you, who are you to judge anyone else after what you did." That's what I meant by credibility.

Slightly off-topic, but I think that most players who read the papers (and I think it's way more than who say they do) read mostly the columns. I don't know for sure if that's the case, but it'd be my guess.