We had a bad thing happen in the newsroom this week, and as a result I must extend our apologies to The Oregonian/Oregonlive.com, and also to our readers.
On Tuesday, I received a call from a senior editor at The Oregonian, who wanted to talk about our excellent Saturday story about the 3rd Congressional District race between Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Joe Kent. The editor informed me that there were several passages in the story that appeared to be identical to a story The Oregonian/Oregonlive.com had run a week earlier about the same race.
My first reaction was “That can’t be true.” But a comparison reading of the stories, side by side, soon showed that there were several spots where the words were identical, and some other spots where the wording varied only slightly.
Erin Middlewood, our managing editor for content, ran the stories through software designed to detect plagiarism and received the same result. When asked about it, our reporter was remorseful and chose to submit his resignation.
Nothing in either story was inaccurate, as far as I can tell, nor was anything fabricated. The stories had some of the same sources — Perez and Kent, obviously — but some different sources, too. The duplications were mostly in the transition sentences, the parts of the story that help the reader navigate through the information.
Still, any duplication is unacceptable in my mind. If you want to know more, Erin found an interesting flow chart published by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism think tank, that helps editors decide if part of an article has been plagiarized. (Following this chart, we were able to see which portions of our story fit this definition.)
We have re-edited our story to remove those parts.
Headline draws complaints
What’s wrong with this headline? “Analysis: National debt could increase under Harris, but it would surge under Trump, fiscal watchdog says.”
When you read it like that, in my opinion it’s perfectly fine. But what drew the criticism of a dozen or so readers was the way it was presented in our Oct. 8 print edition. The first part, ending with the word “Harris,” was in larger, bold type, and the rest of the headline was a smaller subhead.
Readers pointed out that if Trump’s budget proposal was the bigger offender, it should have been in the larger font. I agree. The headline should have been recast, or perhaps changed to something like “Trump, Harris budget proposals would increase national debt, fiscal watchdog says.”
I think what happened here is that we are in the habit of thinking online first, where all the words would have all been the same size and font. But repurposing this head for print wasn’t a good idea.
We didn’t use the photo
Earlier this month a 12-year-old Battle Ground boy allegedly assaulted his school bus driver and then climbed onto the roof of the bus, where he stayed for half an hour until police negotiators convinced him to climb down. A lot of people saw it, and one even sent us a photo of the boy atop the bus. The photo doesn’t show his face, but he would be recognizable to people who know him or his family.
Should we publish the photo? On one hand, it was news. The incident disrupted traffic at a major intersection, and after the boy climbed down, he was taken into custody.
On the other hand, the child attends a special school that offers programs for behavioral health, and no one, including the driver, was seriously injured.
We didn’t publish the photo. It wasn’t necessary to tell the story. He wasn’t being sought by police, nor was there any threat to the public.
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