Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the March 1983 issue of Washington Journalism Review. It was reprinted on Poynter.org in July 2000.

Each day in American newspapers and magazines, journalists kidnap the words of other writers without attribution or shame.

The practice is called plagiarism, a name derived from the Latin word for kidnapper. In the academic world, it is the most serious of crimes. But in the world of journalism, a world without footnotes, the snatching of words and ideas is too often ignored, misunderstood or considered standard procedure.

Reporters plagiarize from novels, encyclopedias, textbooks, magazines, wire stories, syndicated columns, press releases, competing newspapers and the morgue.

Some who commit the unoriginal sin are charlatans. Others resort to it in moments of pressure or personal crisis. Others slide into it out of naivete or ignorance. They do not know how much borrowing is too much, because teachers and editors have failed to set limits and suggest guidelines.

Enough examples of blatant plagiarism have surfaced at good newspapers to make any conscientious editor wary.

• In 1975, a critic at The Atlanta Constitution borrowed most of a film review from Newsweek. Her editors chastised her. The woman claimed to have a photographic memory. She begged to be given another chance, and was. She did it again and lost her job. "It was the stupidest kind of plagiarism," remembers Ed Sears, now managing editor of the The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. "She took the stuff verbatim from a recent edition of Newsweek."
• In 1978, a columnist for the Charlotte News kidnapped an old Art Buchwald column and published it under his own name. He was new to column writing, was responsible for five columns a week, and on a dry day resorted to wholesale plagiarism. An alert reader discovered it. The columnist apologized to his readers. He was moved to the copy desk.
• In 1980, a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote a column on the economy described by one of his editors as "brilliant." This surprised no one, as the writer had proven time and again that he was capable of such work. The paper was later notified by a lawyer that passages from the column were lifted from his client's book. The columnist admitted that he had read a review copy of the book, that he had been influenced by it, and that he had used it without attribution. Managing editor David Hawpe apologized for his columnist in print and eventually moved him to the copy desk.
• In 1981, a Los Angeles reporter for the Associated Press resigned after it was learned that her story about high-speed races on California highways was both a composite and an act of plagiarism. Without attribution, the writer used several anecdotes and passages taken verbatim from New West magazine. She tricked the reader into thinking that she had witnessed the race described in New West.
• In February of 1982, The New York Times discovered that a freelance writer had fabricated a story that appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Christopher Jones, 24, without leaving Spain, wrote an article that created the illusion he had visited remote regions of Cambodia and had caught a glimpse of Pol Pot. The hoax was uncovered when the Village Voice revealed that Jones' ending had been plagiarized from the Andre Malraux novel The Royal Way. Confronted by Times editors in Spain, Jones admitted that he had pilfered Mairaux because "I needed a piece of color."

(As of this writing, The New York Times Magazine is investigating the accusation of "unacceptable borrowing" against another of its writers.)

• In 1972, shortly after becoming the editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Gene Patterson received a letter from the editor of Better Homes and Gardens. It contained a copy of an elaborate color drawing that had appeared in the Times. Attached to it was an identical piece of art from the magazine. "It made me heartsick," said Patterson. "It was a beautifully imaginative, very complicated color drawing. Our artist had copied it exactly, in every detail." He was fired. Plagiarism, obviously, is not confined to words. The way artists borrow from each other deserves its own investigation.

Almost every newspaper I have consulted offers an anecdote about serious plagiarism. I have heard of editorials copied word for word from The New York Times and government handouts. I have heard, but have not been able to verify, stories about a managing editor at a small paper who routinely plagiarized stories from news magazines, stole a whole series from a larger newspaper and even stuck his name over the work of his own reporters. Such a man might have inspired Samuel Johnson's famous piece of sarcasm: "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

Plagiarism in newspapers (ethical plagiarism, that is, not the violation of copyright, which is a legal question) is more common than imagined and in many cases escapes detection. Most cases are cloudier and less spectacular than the ones cited above. Like defensive pass interference in football, they may be blatant or accidental, but they always deserve the yellow flag.

On September 1, 1982, Jerry Bledsoe, a columnist for the Greensboro Daily News and Record, called me. He had just read Best Newspaper Writing 1982, an annual collection, which I edit, of the winning articles from the national writing competition sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE).

One of the stories, written by Tom Archdeacon of the Miami News, described Linda Vaughn, the buxom beauty queen of the racing car circuit. Bledsoe was attracted to the story because in 1975 he had written The World's Number One, Flat-Out, All-Time Great Stock Car Racing Book, which included a chapter on Linda Vaughn. When he read Archdeacon's story, Bledsoe was surprised to see some of his own words under Archdeacon's byline. He sent me a copy of his chapter, underlining 10 instances (about 100 words) in which Archdeacon had borrowed from him without attribution.

In 1975, Jerry Bledsoe had written: "To be a race queen is about the only way a woman can be involved in big time stock car racing." In 1981, Archdeacon changed only the tense: "To be a race queen was about the only way a woman could be involved in big time stock car racing."

The most damning passage was one in which Archdeacon used Bledsoe's language to describe the reaction of grimy mechanics to this voluptuous woman. In Bledsoe's words, the sight of her made them "stand in awe, made them punch one another in the ribs and giggle like little boys...." Archdeacon has them "stand in awe, bashful, punching each other in the ribs, giggling like school boys."

I wrote a report that was sent to ASNE seconding Bledsoe's cry of foul: "I believe that Tom Archdeacon is guilty of low-grade plagiarism and high-grade carelessness. There appears to be much original information in Archdeacon's story. ... But the textual similarities speak for themselves. If Archdeacon were a student in my college English class, I'd give him a stern public lecture on the rules of plagiarism and make him write it again."

Bledsoe's phone call and my report set off a chain reaction. The ASNE contacted the Miami News. Miami News editors confronted Archdeacon. He later described the aftermath of that meeting in a report in the ASNE Bulletin. "It...had the effect of a baseball bat to the solar plexus. I spoke with them truthfully and quite frankly and then was excused from the room. I headed for my desk but never made it. I had to beeline for the bathroom, where I promptly threw up. And I haven't felt much better since."

Archdeacon told his editors that he admired Bledsoe's book, that he had used it for background on Linda Vaughn, and that under deadline he had confused Bledsoe's words with his own in more than 100 pages of sloppily taken notes. "I swear to God," Archdeacon wrote, "there was no deviousness intended."

Archdeacon flew to Greensboro to apologize to Bledsoe. They met for about 15 minutes in the newspaper coffee shop. "He was very contrite," says Bledsoe, "and I felt very sorry for him. It was a gray day and he was as downcast as the weather."

It was decided that Archdeacon would write a mea culpa for the November issue of the ASNE Bulletin. His publisher, David Kraslow, would declare that his writer had "made a serious error in judgment." And the ASNE board would chastise Archdeacon.

The board met in Washington, D.C., on October 21-22, and prepared a statement that read in part: "While what happened is a journalistic misdemeanor and not a felonyóand appears to be a mistake rather than plagiarismó the board deplores that such gross carelessness and sloppiness could be part of the working procedure of such a talented writer." Archdeacon kept the award and his job.

In reviewing the case, it became clear to me that there is little agreement among journalists as to how the rules against plagiarism should affect the behavior of reporters. Most newspapers have no rules. Editors seem loath to define it, especially in marginal cases. Plagiarism is the skeleton in journalism's closet.

In preparing my report on Archdeacon, I found nothing -- no guidelines, no warnings, not even the word plagiarism in indexes of the newspaper stylebooks and journalism textbooks on my shelf. I had to turn to English composition texts and handbooks for scholars for discussion on how much a writer can borrow.

Although most of the editors and senior staff members of the Miami News thought Archdeacon had blundered badly, the verdict was not unanimous. In a memo to ASNE, publisher Kraslow described the feeling of one dissenter, "that Tom did what most journalists do routinely with research material -- weave it into the body of the story without attribution."

The ASNE board, according to three of its members, did not easily come to a consensus on whether Archdeacon had committed a mortal or venial sin or what his penance should be. Nevertheless, "There was no thought of rescinding the award," said Bob Stiff, editor of the St. Petersburg Evening Independent. Still, these 20 top newspaper editors were hazy on the definition of plagiarism. "Well, how much borrowing is too much?" Katherine Fanning, editor and publisher of the Anchorage Daily News, asked later. "Three words? Four words?"

The board accepted the notion that since the borrowing was unintentional, the act was not plagiarism. Jerry Bledsoe disagrees. "I think they need to examine their standards," he said. "I think that they've demeaned their awards."

Part of the problem is that all good reporters compile, borrow and assimilate. "Writers do not read for fun," writes T. S. Garp. They read for work. They borrow juxtapositions, images, metaphors, rhythms, puns, emphases, structures, word orders, alliterations and startling facts. They store these in their memory banks and in

their commonplace books. Months later these words emerge in a new context and with personal meaning, having become their own.

Journalists, like scholars, write within a climate of ideas, ideas that fly from newspaper to newspaper like migrating birds. The hardworking and curious reporter explores each new idea and collects everything on the landscape. But embedded in these good habits are dangers, for both the unprincipled and the undisciplined.

While a virtuous reporter can always avoid crude plagiarism, crude abuses may be nurtured by the ethically ambiguous practices that go on each day in newsrooms. Although I have probably practiced some of these myself, the following procedures now seem dangerous and unprofessional:

ROBBING THE MORGUE. We file old newspaper stories in the morgue, a misnomer, because some of the stories live forever. It is a common and responsible newspaper practice to dig in those files for background, a sense of history and perspective. When we cover the trial of a murderer, we consult the clips on his arrest.

Most journalists recognize the dangers. Do we, under deadline, borrow paragraphs verbatim without verification or attribution? Do we recycle old quotations without letting readers know that a quote may be out of date or secondhand?

Ed Sears describes a case in Atlanta where "a reporter had lifted some paragraphs verbatim from the clips. We discovered it only because the facts he lifted turned out to be wrong, even though it had been written by a good reporter. I don't know how much of that goes on. As for our guidelines, there are none."

Some editors argue that a reporter may borrow an aptly worded paragraph, perhaps more, from an old story from his own newspaper.

A newspaper may have a good reason for permitting reporters to use information from the clips verbatim. Perhaps the paper has reduced a difficult concept (the Consumer Price Index) to a clear formula, or prefers to use the same paragraph of background for a running story.

In most cases, the writer should assimilate information from the clips and rewrite or let the narrative suggest that material derives from earlier accounts.

Such care becomes essential in an age when technology makes the mining of the clips easier -- kidnapping by computer. The New York Times, for example, now has a split-screen capability on terminals, which can display a new story on the left and a story retrieved from the clips on the right. "Retrieved information," said a recent story in presstime, "can be inserted electronically into the working story."

ABUSING THE WIRES. Editors tell of wire stories that appear, almost word for word, under the bylines of local writers. The reverse can happen when reporters from the AP or UPI do not rephrase and summarize adequately the stories of local reporters.

Many newspaper stories combine original reporting with information compiled from news services. Such collaboration has a long history and is essential to daily journalism. But it can be done in unscrupulous ways.

Editors can help create a sense of source for the reader by clearly labeling when wire copy has been used in a staff story. This can be done with a tag line or in the text.

The AP bylaws give the wire service the right to use "spot" news stories from member newspapers as opposed to "enterprise" pieces. According to Louis D. Boccardi, AP vice president and executive editor, AP writers are expected to rewrite stories, although it is accepted that direct quotations will reappear word for word.

"I learned to rewrite everything," says Melvin Mencher, professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and a former United Press staffer. "We were told to rewrite and I took that seriously. It had some moral compulsion. But we live in a different age, the age as media star. It's me, me, me the writer. Attribution comes awfully hard to that mindset."

LIFTING FROM OTHER NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES. Broadcast media -- from local radio to network television magazine shows -- steal from newspapers without attribution in order to preserve the myth of exclusivity.

But newspapers cannot complain. They feast on each other like sharks, a banquet that has gone on for years. Donald Murray, professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and newspaper writing coach, remembers his days as a rewrite man for the Boston Herald in the early 1950s. Every day he was tossed clips from all the competing newspapers in town. "It was nothing to turn out 50 quick run-throughs," he says. "Whatever scholarly ideas I had about plagiarism went by the board."

His experience on the police beat also tempered his idealism. "The copy desk would put into my story details from competing editions that I knew weren't true," Murray recalls. "One reporter in town would always find pink panties at a crime scene, even when the cops couldn't. The desk would always put the damn panties in my story."

Even today reporters loot and pillage other newspapers and magazines, using quotations and information without attribution or verification. "A badly trained reporter develops instincts and reactions that are immoral and dangerous for his career," says Mencher. "He's at a small paper somewhere. They're understaffed. He has to write about Sugar Ray Leonard. So he steals from Sports Illustrated."

LOOTING PRESS RELEASES. When I was film critic for the St. Petersburg Times, I received for each new film a press packet of canned feature stories with quotes from actors and directors. It was an open invitation to plagiarism.

Each day, newspapers receive dozens of releases. Responsible editors permit staff writers to work these over, to elaborate on them and check them for accuracy.

A different type of journalism was practiced last year at the Trenton Times, where a reporter was fired his first day on the job. "His offense," according to The Wall Street Journal, "was not writing up a news announcement exactly as a company had submitted it." The editors had ordered the press release run without a change to protect a big advertiser. The competing paper, the Trentonian, published the release without alteration.

"Apparently it's all right to plagiarize from press releases," says Don Murray. "You see university press releases published everywhere, word for word."

Perhaps newspapers should add a tag line to stories taken exclusively from press releases. It could read "released from...." If an editor is ashamed to do that, he or she should make sure the story contains additional reporting, verification and rewording.

HIDING COLLABORATION IN THE CLOSET. When a number of writers collaborate on a project, care should be taken to preserve the integrity of the byline. Did the person named write most of the story? Are the contributions of others noted at the bottom?

Billie Bledsoe, food editor of the San Antonio Express, recently exposed a case of veiled collaboration involving the famous food critic James Beard, whose work is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. Bledsoe wrote that Beard "has admitted falsifying a column about two meals he claimed to have eaten in San Antonio on September 20." The column fooled the reader into thinking that Beard had attended the events. Beard admitted to Bledsoe that he based his review on notes by an assistant.

Professor Murray says some of his college students get hired as stringers, perhaps to cover local basketball games. According to Murray, the work of his students sometimes appears under the bylines of staff writers.

CRIBBING FROM THE BOOKS, SCHOLARSHIP, AND RESEARCH OF OTHERS. Reporters have the same responsibility as scholars to attribute work derived from the research of others. The difference is that journalists have not inherited the attributive scaffolding that hangs, sometimes clumsily, on the work of scholars. Nor do they want readers distracted by ibids or lengthy parentheses.

Good advice comes from William Rivers and Shelley Smolkin in their book Free- Lancers and Staff Writers: "It is unnecessary, of course, for the writer to try to trace down the origins of every captivating phrase.... It is not at all absurd, however, to give credit for a sentence. One worth using should be clothed in quotation marks and attributed to its author. Not...with the footnoting that is common in scholarly journals -- but with a smooth note in the text."

Design consultant and journalism professor Mario Garcia is the author of Contemporary Newspaper Design. He has seen his work used time and again without proper credit. "When editors do a graphics stylebook for in-house consumption," says Garcia, "they will take huge sections of my book without any mention of my name. That hurts."

The Archdeacon case falls in the category of unattributed research. He could have probably spared himself much grief by simply dropping Jerry Bledsoe's name into the text.

RECYCLING YOUR OLD STORIES. A low-grade ethical problem is the borrowing by a writer of his own work. Even Ann Landers has been caught and criticized for passing off old work as new. As writers move from newspaper to newspaper, they take files of their stories with them and are not above copying themselves when pressed. Such exhumation should be done with the permission of the newspaper in which the story first appeared and with a note of explanation to the reader.

These questions are not designed to put obstacles in the writer's path or to confuse minor abuses with major ones. But misdemeanors can lead to felonies, and an ethically loose atmosphere fosters sloppy work and journalistic malpractice.

While much confusion tangles the issue of plagiarism, some possible paths can be cut through the thicket.

Journalism textbooks and newspaper stylebooks should take up the issue and suggest guidelines for writers. Plagiarism, including the abuses of faculty members, such as ghostwriting of textbooks and kidnapping by professors of the work of graduate assistants, should be discussed in college classrooms. Students should be told -- and in writing -- what is expected of them.

If I were a city editor, I would call my staff together to talk about plagiarism in all its manifestations and to spell out these reasons for tightening standards:

1. Plagiarism is a form of deception.
2. Plagiarism is a violation of language. Linguists, like Noam Chomsky, emphasize the essential creativity of all language. Almost every sentence is unique. If you don't believe that, apply this test: Count all the sentences in all the stories in The New York Times for any given year. How many are identical? Plagiarism is a crime against the nature of language.
3. Plagiarism is a substitute for reporting. A reporter who assumes the accuracy of information in the clips or in wire stories or in textbooks is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Of course, reporters consider the source of information and are always fighting the clock. But to the extent that they depend upon the work and words of others, they distance themselves from events and people and create an environment for inaccuracy. Important mistakes, especially when they turn up in usually reliable sources of information, become fossilized in the clips. "What you get," says Mel Mencher, "is this installation of inaccuracy in the record."
4. Plagiarism is a substitute for thinking. "Writing is discovery," says Donald Fry, professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. "Plagiarism is secondhand thinking."
5. Plagiarism poisons the relationship between writer and reader. "What readers want to believe," says Fry, "is that they're listening to a real voice conveying his own thought."

Because plagiarism is hard to detect, some editors feel they must fire those who practice it. Gene Patterson fired his offending artist "to send a clear message to the staff."

Other editors have taken milder measures hoping to rehabilitate the writer, permitting him to work his way back to respectability. This has happened, by all accounts, in Charlotte and Louisville.

There is no agreement on how journalism students should be punished. Some universities view expulsion as the only way to raise standards. Expulsion is what happened to a student at Columbia who "borrowed copiously" from Newsweek in his master's thesis.

Others favor less severe punishment. "Plagiarism can be an opportunity to teach," says Neale Copple, dean of journalism at the University of Nebraska. "You make sure the kid never does it again. You don't brand him for life. You just make it a learning experience for everybody."

Free-lance scoundrels can ply their trade through plagiarism. Newspaper and magazine editors who often do not know personally the freelance writers they deal with should watch out for plagiarists. Free-lancers can more easily escape detection and punishment than staff writers. When a malefactor is exposed, his name should be circulated privately or through trade journals.

This was done in Liaison magazine, a journal for evangelical religious publishers. Last summer the journal printed a notice exposing a writer who was selling plagiarized articles, written under different names, to several religious publications. The notice in Liaison saved Perspective magazine from publishing a plagiarized article submitted by that writer. Liaison promised to "spread the word on the cheaters in the trade."

Tom Archdeacon admits that his plagiarism of Jerry Bledsoe was a failure of technique. He failed to distinguish in his notes between his own words and the words of another. If bad work habits lead the writer astray, he is as responsible for the result of his actions as the drunk driver.

Careful work habits help the writer walk a straight line. Don Murray suggests that the first draft be written without notes. "I teach my students not to be a secretary to their notes," he says. "Let it flow. Put all those notes aside. You can always go back to them."

Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, in The Modern Researcher, suggest that all researchers rewrite material into their notes rather than copy them verbatim. This practice has three beneficial effects: "You have made an effort of thought which has imprinted the information on your mind; you have practiced the art of writing by making a paraphrase; and you have at the same time taken a step toward your first draft, for here and now these are your words, not a piece of plagiarism.... "

In the most serious cases, plagiarism is a human problem rather than a technical one. It is practiced by people under duress, people who act without grace under pressure. Editors need to be sensitive to those pressures.

Surely the saddest case was that of Emily Ann Fisher, a reporter/intern at The Washington Post who was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard. In July of 1973, she inserted dialogue from Catcher in the Rye into a feature story she had written for the Post. She was fired. Friends say she was a brilliant, deeply troubled woman who had a photographic memory. No one is sure how intentional her act was or what emotional pressures led her to borrow from Salinger. But she later took her life.

Ultimately, it is the plagiarist who suffers most from plagiarism. This self-inflicted pain was well expressed by a veteran reporter from the St. Petersburg Times, who in July of 1979 kidnapped about one-third of a magazine article on credit cards from Changing Times. On the day of her resignation, she pinned a brave letter to the newsroom bulletin board: "Twelve years of dedicated journalism down the drain because of a stupid mistake," she wrote. "I am writing this public explanation for a selfish reason. It will be easier for me to live with myself knowing that the truth is known. But I hope my mistake will serve as a lesson to others. I have let the Times down. I have let myself down. But most of all, I have let the profession down. And for that I am truly sorry."