There was a bit of a brouhaha in the writing world last week,* and I’ve been watching the commentary and thinking about it, wondering if it was something I should bring to your attention.

It started when a well-known freelance journalist, Nate Thayer, was approached by an editor at the Atlantic Digital and asked if he’d allow them to use an article he’d already written (published elsewhere). The editor wanted a much shorter article; Thayer would have to work on it. And, oh, yes, one more thing: he would not be paid, other than by the pleasure of his exposure in the Atlantic. You can read Thayer’s reaction here. Let’s just say it wasn’t the best offer he’d ever had.

He has a point. But the digital world is bringing changes to every single person who writes or edits for a living. (God knows I’ve written a lot about that.) The world is—no, has—changed. My first thought was outrage on Thayer’s behalf, but then I had one of those welcome-to-my-world moments and decided not to think about it. 🙂 I have deadlines to meet. Besides, someone less accomplished—me, for instance—would have jumped at the chance of having her article in front of the Atlantic’s thirteen million viewers.

However, two industry folks I follow closely—Jane Friedman and Porter Anderson—each had something to say about it. Between them you’ll find every link you need to read up. “As indignant as Thayer might be,” Friedman wrote in a comprehensive post that covers all bases,

I find his perplexed state to be rather disingenuous if he’s been keeping up at all with the evolution of online journalism. One can imagine a brief “No, thank you,” would have been the more graceful gesture, but on the other hand, if writers don’t express outrage at not being paid—and don’t take editors to task for it—can they really expect the situation to change? (Personally, I still like and advocate for the brevity of the “No, thanks,” answer. If editors hear “no” often enough and can’t get their hands on the content they want or need, that spurs change, too.)

Anderson further notes there is a lot more to this story than immediately meets the eye:

One of the elements of this only obliquely touched on in the conversations I’ve followed is a huge infusion (that’s the kind term) of amateurs into the mix in recent years. Like the folks who somehow see the advent of the Internet as a signal that they have the talent and skill to write books, there are many more largely untrained and inexperienced people who somehow believe they know how to be journalists. And in many cases, the industry’s changed posture in terms of pay structures and revenue is being subsidized by the willingness of these newcomers to work without compensation. They are, after all, hungrier for exposure than practiced journalists are and have no personal experience of being well and consistently paid for their work.

And the story hasn’t gone away. No, it’s just morphed in the direction of the miserable state of the profession of journalism—mostly from the standpoint of the journalists. (Legendary journalist Mort Rosenblum has been talking about it for ages, for example.) Writing for the Washington Post, Ezra Klein shows us how the digital world is changing what journalism is, and who writes it:

The [traditional] transaction between journalists and their sources is that the sources work for exposure—either for themselves or for their ideas—and the journalists repackage that work and sell it for money. … Now, the people who were once sources can write their own blogs, or they send op-ed submissions or even feature articles to editors. … It’s a direct relationship with an audience rather than one mediated by a professional journalist. … If you look at who’s turning out copy for major media outlets but isn’t being paid, it’s not, by and large, professional journalists, or even wannabe professional journalists. The former typically won’t write without pay and editors generally don’t want to publish the latter. It’s people who, in another world, would be sources for professional journalists. It’s academics and business consultants and market analysts and former politicians. They have the expertise that makes editors—and readers—trust them. They have good ideas for articles. They have day jobs that … subsidize the time they spending working for media exposure. And they’re often very good writers.

Interesting, no? I hadn’t really thought about it, but there it is, plain as the nose on your face. **

Another writer I follow, Mathew Ingram, notes that many online news entities like Atlantic Digital and Huffington Post would simply quote large swaths of an article they coveted:

In some ways, it’s odd that the Atlantic would even bother to ask Thayer for permission to run a condensed version of his piece: many outlets would have simply excerpted large chunks of it with links back to Thayer’s original … since that costs nothing and achieves virtually the exact same thing (Thayer even mentions this possibility in his blog post). Whether you believe this is right or wrong, it arguably serves a purpose in the media ecosystem. And we are more or less stuck with it, whether you like it or not.

At this point the interested reader (following tweets, mostly, of the writers I’ve mentioned) arrives at a discussion of plagiarism. Ingram wrote another article about how writing for the Internet makes attribution easier (but also more complicated). In it, he asks two great questions: 1) Is a small link to the source enough? And 2) How much content is too much to take?

This is also the root of the controversy over what some call the “over-aggregation” by sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider, where large chunks of stories from other sites—and in some cases, the entire story or post—is published, along with a “via” link somewhere at the bottom of the post. Other blogs, including The Verge and Engadget, have been criticized in the past for burying links to the original source of the content they reproduce, to try and disguise what they have borrowed.

Well! Now we’ve reached a topic I know a little something about. (You were perhaps wondering. I know this piece is getting longish but bear with me.) Authors who’ve worked with me on their nonfiction manuscripts know I can be a real stickler about citing sources and making sure we know where the information came from. Plagiarism is one thing; we know what it is because we learned about it in school. But employment at a publisher will teach you intimately about copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. As an editor, I’m pretty fierce about it;*** if I don’t do it right, the publisher who hired me could get sued. As a writer myself, I understand how protective one can be of one’s own work.

I find all of this very interesting but I started wondering if I had something to add for my readers (all nine of you). Because that is the point: while it’s a perfectly legitimate activity to simply point readers to an excellent article—this is what folks do on Facebook, for example, when they “share” a link; it’s what I do in my Short Saturday posts, as do many other bloggers—I also believe it’s important you contribute to the conversation.

So this, friends, is my supplement. Don’t cut corners; you should be careful that what you say is your own. When you are quoting someone’s work, be kind to your sources and mention them in your text—since it’s unlikely you’re using footnotes in online media. Give credit where it’s due. It’s the right thing to do.

* As I wrote this. It’s been a couple weeks now.
** But are these folks journalists? Not really. They’re one-trick ponies: experts in their own topic but no other. Journalists, on the other hand, conceive of story ideas and pursue them, across all topics (although they sometimes specialize: medical issues, say, or U.S. politics, God help them).
*** A couple years ago one author mentioned me in his acknowledgments as having taught him more about citations than his college English teacher.

Tweet: The digital world is changing what #journalism is, and who writes it.
Tweet: Intellectual property: As an editor, I’m pretty fierce about it; the publisher who hired me could get sued. 

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