Where is the line between attribution and plagiarism?

[cubman]

I stopped worrying about using radio broadcasts to fill out my round-up with some play-by-play I caught while listening in the car going between games when I realized the local radio station was using my stories word-for-word to do their morning sports update.

Yes, I never worried about doing it at all and was shocked when the guy emailed. Like I said, he was and likely still is a first-class jerk anyway. I avoided him at every opportunity.
Radio stations rip and read all the time. It's very noticeable to those of us with a discerning ear. It's even more obvious when it's 5:30 in the afternoon and their newscasts still consist of yesterday's news.

 

[SFIND]

I stopped worrying about using radio broadcasts to fill out my round-up with some play-by-play I caught while listening in the car going between games when I realized the local radio station was using my stories word-for-word to do their morning sports update.

I was a guest on a local show once in studio, and for some reason the guy wanted me to help him read stories for his top of the show update. He handed me two newspaper cutouts of my own stories.

 

[YankeeFan]

Along these lines...

WaPo hires an an aggregator, then fires her for not changing up the wording of the stories she was aggregating well enough. But, they also did not call what she did plagiarism.

The Washington Post has dismissed a reporter for inadequately attributing material and closely parroting sentences from other publications in articles based on outside news sources.

The reporter, Marwa Eltagouri, 26, was let go last week before completing the newsroom's mandatory nine-month probationary period for new employees.

The Post's editors found that she used without proper attribution reporting by at least a dozen other news organizations in articles she wrote since being hired in October. The sources included the New York Times, the Sacramento Bee, CNN, the Orlando Sentinel, the Oregonian, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and the McDonough County Voice, a daily paper based in Macomb, Ill.

The Post did not characterize Eltagouri's actions as plagiarism, which is a gross breach of journalistic ethics and often warrants dismissal.

Instead, Eltagouri's conduct appears to have fallen into a grayer area involving "aggregation," the rewriting of news stories published by others. The practice has become common among many news organizations as they seek to compete for readers on the internet.

Journalists engaged in aggregation are obligated to attribute basic facts, quotes and assertions to their source; any rephrased prose must also be attributed. The rules for structuring an aggregated story are generally murkier.

Eltagouri appears to have mimicked too closely the structure of the news stories she was aggregating. She also failed to attribute various facts from those articles, potentially leaving a reader with the impression that she had gathered the information herself. And her wording, at times, closely resembled — although it didn't precisely copy — the source article.

Post dismisses reporter for lax attribution in 'aggregated' news stories

 

[Slacker]

Along these lines...

WaPo hires an an aggregator, then fires her for not changing up the wording of the stories she was aggregating well enough. But, they also did not call what she did plagiarism.

The Washington Post has dismissed a reporter for inadequately attributing material and closely parroting sentences from other publications in articles based on outside news sources.

The reporter, Marwa Eltagouri, 26, was let go last week before completing the newsroom's mandatory nine-month probationary period for new employees.

The Post's editors found that she used without proper attribution reporting by at least a dozen other news organizations in articles she wrote since being hired in October. The sources included the New York Times, the Sacramento Bee, CNN, the Orlando Sentinel, the Oregonian, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and the McDonough County Voice, a daily paper based in Macomb, Ill.

The Post did not characterize Eltagouri's actions as plagiarism, which is a gross breach of journalistic ethics and often warrants dismissal.

Instead, Eltagouri's conduct appears to have fallen into a grayer area involving "aggregation," the rewriting of news stories published by others. The practice has become common among many news organizations as they seek to compete for readers on the internet.

Journalists engaged in aggregation are obligated to attribute basic facts, quotes and assertions to their source; any rephrased prose must also be attributed. The rules for structuring an aggregated story are generally murkier.

Eltagouri appears to have mimicked too closely the structure of the news stories she was aggregating. She also failed to attribute various facts from those articles, potentially leaving a reader with the impression that she had gathered the information herself. And her wording, at times, closely resembled — although it didn't precisely copy — the source article.

Post dismisses reporter for lax attribution in 'aggregated' news stories

That's pretty funny sad strange.