Ron Borges - Plagiarist?

I think Dave's post ought to be exhibit A for getting rid of those stupid notes columns and coming up with a different way to cover the league that involves letting the reporter report, not act as a furtive copy editor.

 

Perry A?

 

i agree. that's why i don't do ours anymore. i'd rather spend my days, you know, reporting. not regurgitating.

 

A well-known boxing writer and I were discussing the Borges plagiarism case yesterday and he told me Borges in the late 1990s was relieved of his duties as a columnist from the Ring magazine, KO, et al (they're all owned by the same company in Philly) because he was filing the same exact boxing columns that he wrote for the Globe. Borges got away with it for several issues because the editor wasn't internet savvy and didn't read Borges' stuff in the Globe ... until he visited Boston one day, read a column, and then saw the same exact column cross his desk two weeks later. So he apparently has been caught with his pants down before by an editor he thought he could hoodwink with duplicate work.

So would this be like John Fogarty plagiarising himself?

 

How do you jump to the conclusion that there was an intent to deceive? Many, many, many writers recycle their newspaper stories into magazine articles, books, even movie scripts. Is there a hard-and-fast rule on how much needs to be changed? A word here and there? You get what you pay for -- if you are expecting exclusive material, you pay for it. If you pay a newspaper reporter to freelance for you, you have to expect recycled stuff because his newspaper would be rightly pissed if he were giving the magazine stuff he hadn't already given the paper.

 

He's not the guy I'm talking about...

 

From what I was told, they were exact duplicates, word-for-word, punctuation-for-punctuation. Both the magazine getting the double dip and the Globe should be furious about something like that. What right does he have to re-sell work he was already paid to have published in the Globe? I know beat writers re-sell their INFORMATION to internet sites and magazines and the like all the time, but taking copyrighted work and giving it to another publication seems waaaaaaaaaay out of bounds.

 

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid35071.aspx

 

Illuminating post by Krieger

In a nutshell, he said that the difference between “plagiarism” and not is changing a few words – using the Thesaurus

That strikes me as absurd. And I’m not saying Kreiger is absurd – he’s an iconic thinker and a good columnist. It’s absurd that changing a word is the difference between honor and disgrace.

Is plagiarism just a mechanical contrivance?

It shouldn’t be.

The mechanical stuff - the words and phrasing – isn’t as important as the idea. Because nobody owns facts, words or phrases.

Plagiarism should be the theft of original thought.

But if you look at the sando-borges contretemps – there was no original thought. Just a factual chronology of a player. Yes, Borges lifted Sando’s mechanical construction, so technically he was guilty under existing convention. But there was no original thought – and Sando does not own the facts.

When 500 reporters cover the Super Bowl – and write games stories – how many of them read alike? A lot. The reason being everybody is writing from the same set of facts. But you wouldn’t call any of those stories plagiarized (though given half a chance some of the zealots on this board might)

The problem with plagiarism – which so many seem to think is black and white – is the issue of originality. It’s a rare commodity. And difficult to define. Whenever you think you’re taking an original approach to a story, you probably aren’t. Somewhere – in the dim mist of writing history - it’s been done. Only the names, places and dates have changed. (This is doubly true in sportswriting, in which 24/7 media creates an echo chamber - how many of the fulminating impassioned outraged ironic columns about Terrell Owens sounded exactly alike?)

Here’s something I lifted from a Penelope Alfrey essay on “originality and plagiarism”:

"At the heart of copyright law lies the elusive ideal of originality -- and its corollary, plagiarism. Originality and plagiarism are not opposites but are closely related and both are linked to the idea of genius or imagination.

"Both legally and culturally, originality and copyright law are very complex and raise some seminal issues which are largely ignored. There is no established discourse on the relationship between visual culture and copyright law, yet the expansion of a litigious mentality has begun to affect it, not least within the universities. Some fundamental questions should underpin any consideration of this subject:

"What is originality in abstract terms? How do we recognize it in material terms? Is it measurable? And if so, by what means? Is it as important, either as an ideal or a reality, as we are led to believe? Is it a rational or even accessible goal? If originality -- however defined -- is important, to whom is it important? To the individual or to society? Or to both? And if the answer is both, is it possible to fulfill both interests or is there a clash and resulting imbalance? Finally, if originality does exist in a quantifiable way, who is entitled to claim it? and how does originality connect with ideas of ownership?"

 

Ten bucks says hh didn't read that selection all the way through before he posted it.

 

Another ten says hh got busted in school too many times for reports that read like Encyclopedia Britannica.

 

We can debate the length of the suspension as much as we want, but HH's continuing defense of word-for-word duplication of somebody else's work under a person's byline -- with the odd "well, there aren't a lot of ways to write it" defense -- continues to mystify me.