Bloggers, Links and Plagiarism

Today, blogger Jim Romenesko — a staple at Poynter for over 12 years — resigned from his job after being accused of inadequately attributing quotes in his blog posts. According to Poynter's director, Romenesko would often copy and paste entire sections of news articles, and although he linked to the original sources, he did not enclose the copied information in quotation marks.

Bloggers and media critics have responded to Romenesko's departure with both harsh criticism and support. The response I found most interesting, however, came from Steve Buttry at the Journal Registry Company. Buttry argues that in an Internet era, linking to a source is the new in-text attribution.

"I agree that Romenesko — and any journalist — should use quotation marks when using exact words of people. But when you credit and link, failure to quote is not plagiarism. It's a punctuation offense, not a serious breach of journalism ethics."

At first thought, the idea of literally copying and pasting text from articles or sources seems like it warrants some sort of reprimand. We've been taught since we could write that all of the information that we use in papers and projects must be cited according to the rules of MLA or APA. Neglecting to cite information (or neglecting to use the appropriate commas and periods on the works cited page) constitutes plagiarism. Plain and simple.

The digital era is different, and I believe that it calls for us to reconsider the old habits and ideas of citations and plagiarism. In printed text, we can't link to sources. The ability to create a link, however, has revolutionized the idea of giving credit. Links create an easy-to-navigate, digital works cited page right within the body of the article or report. There's no need for messy parenthetical citations of authors, page numbers, and years, and no need to flip to the end of the report to hunt down a source.

It's simpler; it's cleaner; and it's certainly a lot easier to find the source of information.

Romenesko should have added quotation marks around the information he copied; it is the ethical thing to do, and it distinguishes between the blogger's voice and another author's writing. However, I agree with Buttry's standpoint: Romenesko's lack of quotation marks is not indicative of plagiarism, because he never failed to link to a source. His resignation over the matter seems like an extreme response to a minor offense.