sorry to see jim go

[alocispepraluger102]

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/journalism-ethics-taken-too-seriously-romenesko-scolded-on-his-own-blog/?src=tp

Journalism Ethics Taken Too Seriously? Romenesko Scolded on His Own Blog

By JEREMY W. PETERSSometimes you can follow rules right out the window.

That is the situation the Poynter Institute — an organization that teaches journalistic ethics and practices — finds itself in after scolding its most famous writer, Jim Romenesko, for a technical infraction of its guidelines.

Known in journalistic circles for his summaries of media-related stories around the country, Mr. Romenesko was faulted in a blog post at the site that carries his name for exhibiting “a pattern of incomplete attribution.”

Now Poynter stands to lose Mr. Romenesko altogether. He has twice offered his resignation, he said, though Poynter has refused to accept it. His work draws considerable traffic to Poynter.org and he is just a few weeks from retirement.

Journalists from across the country unleashed a torrent of criticism on Poynter’s Web site on Thursday, accusing it of being school-marmish and petty, and for tarnishing the name of a man who is deeply admired by his colleagues.

“Seriously, Poynter?” asked one. “THIS is the issue that you get outraged about? THIS is the issue that leads you to plant your flag on morals, ethics and proper journalistic behavior?”

In an e-mail, Mr. Romenesko said he would rather have seen his 12-year run at Poynter end on better terms. ”This really did throw me for a loop,” he said, declining to comment further. “I think I’d probably prefer to go quietly.”

Many journalists saw the aggregating Mr. Romenesko did in his early-morning posts as the best real estate in American journalism to promote their work. They would send him links to their stories and encourage him to summarize them. So the idea that anyone could think he was somehow trying to take credit for work that wasn’t his rang false.

“Unless there are far more egregious examples out there — which I strain to imagine, since the practice and intent of Romenesko’s blog is self-evident — this is a nothingburger,” said James Poniewozik, the television critic for Time magazine, in a comment on Poynter’s site.

In an interview this summer, Mr. Romenesko, 58, described how he was looking forward to leaving aggregation behind to get back to reporting, the reason he became a journalist in the first place. His new site, JimRomenesko.com, will still cover media but will also touch on other topics he is interested in, like food, finance and real estate.

“I’m not going to be doing three-sentence summaries of other people’s work. That’s behind me,” he said in the summer.

Mr. Romenesko was taken to the woodshed by Julie Moos, director of Poynter Online, for failing to put quotation marks around phrases he borrowed from articles he was aggregating for his blog.

“One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another,” Ms. Moos wrote in the blog post.

Yet evidently Mr. Romenesko hadn’t offended any of the writers whose work he was summarizing. Ms. Moos said that to her knowledge none of them had ever complained.

The Poynter response drew mockery from some corners of the Web. The Awl, a blog that follows media, culture and politics, said the site had become “intolerable” as Mr. Romenesko has taken on a reduced role there.

[papsrus]

Interesting. I took a few classes at Poynter back in the day. It is a first-class institution, IMO.

I have read Romenesko, but not religiously, and always found him to be relevant and insightful. And as the article says, there's certainly no reason for him to claim someone else's writing as his own, given the nature of his work.

But I can understand Poynter's point of view here. While what he failed to properly quote may not have been that big a deal, you do run the danger of entering kind of a slippery slope here, particularly if a pattern emerges. And Poynter would open themselves up to criticism for letting it slide in one case and not others, if they didn't address it here.

And no one's work should be above criticism. It's kind of ironic that Romenesko apparently doesn't appreciate that.

[alocispepraluger102]

Interesting. I took a few classes at Poynter back in the day. It is a first-class institution, IMO.

I have read Romenesko, but not religiously, and always found him to be relevant and insightful. And as the article says, there's certainly no reason for him to claim someone else's writing as his own, given the nature of his work.

But I can understand Poynter's point of view here. While what he failed to properly quote may not have been that big a deal, you do run the danger of entering kind of a slippery slope here, particularly if a pattern emerges. And Poynter would open themselves up to criticism for letting it slide in one case and not others, if they didn't address it here.

And no one's work should be above criticism. It's kind of ironic that Romenesko apparently doesn't appreciate that.

the thinnest skins of all indeed belong to us critics.

[Big Wheel]

Interesting. I took a few classes at Poynter back in the day. It is a first-class institution, IMO.

I have read Romenesko, but not religiously, and always found him to be relevant and insightful. And as the article says, there's certainly no reason for him to claim someone else's writing as his own, given the nature of his work.

But I can understand Poynter's point of view here. While what he failed to properly quote may not have been that big a deal, you do run the danger of entering kind of a slippery slope here, particularly if a pattern emerges. And Poynter would open themselves up to criticism for letting it slide in one case and not others, if they didn't address it here.

And no one's work should be above criticism. It's kind of ironic that Romenesko apparently doesn't appreciate that.

Except...this is basically always how Romenesko has formatted his items. Everyone who reads him knows that's how he presents things and why he does it this way. Did this editor just never ever bother to read her own writer?

The point of attribution is to make it clear where the information is coming from. Nobody was unclear on where the info was coming from with Romenesko's blog. In fact it looks like Romenesko had been much clearer with the attributions until Poynter themselves imposed a format change from above onto him - as noted by the writer who Poynter credited with "bringing this matter to their attention." http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_romenesko_saga.php

My questions did not focus solely on Jim Romenesko (who did not respond to my request for comment) but on several recent changes on the blog since it became Romenesko+, adding a number of writers and changing its aggregation style.....

...Moos wrote that she had discovered this “incomplete attribution” when she looked back at Jim Romenesko’s earlier work. I did not find this to be the case, probably because his posts used to be so short. My search of the archives was limited, but it appeared to me that the frequent “incomplete attribution” started creeping into Poynter’s blog posts earlier this year when they became noticeably longer, and, I would argue, ‘over-aggregated.’

In other words, Poynter seems to have realized that pure aggregation like old-school Romenesko, short and sweet, doesn't do you any good, financially speaking, unless you are Google and can make money off redirecting people to the stuff you're aggregating. So they told Romenesko to make everything longer to keep people on Poynter's site, thus ruining the point of his original concept. Then when a reporter simply asked them if this really was a sensible idea they scolded Romenesko for it and wrote a haughty blog post to secure even more pageviews. And they threw the blog post up there in a way that appeared specifically timed to scoop the reporter who was asking them these questions so she could write her own story.

And it sounds like Romenesko was planning on bailing anyway before all this went down. Why am I not surprised?

Edited November 13, 2011 by Big Wheel

[papsrus]

So what you're saying is that Poynter suddenly found religion on the question of attribution only after a change in format that required Romenesko to write longer pieces -- a change in format driven by the desire to generate more (or, actually, longer) page views? The "sticky" factor, I guess.

That his previous writing style didn't require it, but the new emphasis on longer pieces does.

I've never been clear, actually, on whether the metric is "time spent" on a web site (stickiness) or "page views" (volume of traffic). A combination of the two is likely ideal.

But there is no doubt that tailoring content to generate increased traffic -- whatever your metric -- is impacting journalism, perhaps not entirely in a negative way.

To what extent that played a role here is an interesting question.

Edited November 13, 2011 by papsrus

[Big Wheel]

So what you're saying is that Poynter suddenly found religion on the question of attribution only after a change in format that required Romenesko to write longer pieces -- a change in format driven by the desire to generate more (or, actually, longer) page views? The "sticky" factor, I guess.

I am saying that what Romenesko was doing in the past barely even qualified as a "blog post." It was just a pure digest of stories with one or two sentences quoted. There was never any question of attribution because there was little to no editorial analysis to speak of that would have muddied the waters on whose words were being posted. Just like the automated weekly email I get from Youtube telling me what videos my favorite accounts are posting doesn't contain paragraphs telling me what Youtube thinks of the videos.

Poynter has a lot of gall chastising their writer for something he would never have done in the first place if it hadn't been for their ordering him to do it out of greed.

[papsrus]

Poynter has a lot of gall chastising their writer for something he would never have done in the first place if it hadn't been for their ordering him to do it out of greed.

Perhaps greed was their motivation. Perhaps not.

The Washpost's Erik Wemple offers his take:

And no matter what the mob says about her overreaction, (The Poynter Institute's Julie) Moos has a legitimate technical point to address. Follow the logic trail:

● Romenesko routinely used quotation marks in his summaries;

● Those quotation marks identified text that came directly from the linked story;

● Other text didn’t carry quotation marks. Shouldn’t that always indicate original writing? Isn’t that a standard that wins nods from everyone in the industry?

Considering that just about everything Romenesko did at Poynter fell under an aggregational banner, it seems a stretch to call it plagiarism. Maybe “aggiarism” works better. Whatever it is, though, it’s something. It’s a matter that Moos had to take on.

One commenter suggested that she should have handled it quietly, via an admonition to Romenesko and a directive to do things differently from here on out. Such doesn’t appear a feasible course for a site that preaches transparency every time a newspaper makes a big mistake or a public official stonewalls on a FOIA request.

Wemple further indicates that the discrepancies in the way Romenesko used attribution were brought to Moor's attention by the Columbia Journalism Review. It was only after that point that she began to look into it.

I'm not sure I would arrive at the conclusion that greed was Moor's motivation, given this description of events.

Edited November 14, 2011 by papsrus

[Big Wheel]

Poynter has a lot of gall chastising their writer for something he would never have done in the first place if it hadn't been for their ordering him to do it out of greed.

Perhaps greed was their motivation. Perhaps not.

The Washpost's Erik Wemple offers his take:

And no matter what the mob says about her overreaction, (The Poynter Institute's Julie) Moos has a legitimate technical point to address. Follow the logic trail:

● Romenesko routinely used quotation marks in his summaries;

● Those quotation marks identified text that came directly from the linked story;

● Other text didn’t carry quotation marks. Shouldn’t that always indicate original writing? Isn’t that a standard that wins nods from everyone in the industry?

Considering that just about everything Romenesko did at Poynter fell under an aggregational banner, it seems a stretch to call it plagiarism. Maybe “aggiarism” works better. Whatever it is, though, it’s something. It’s a matter that Moos had to take on.

One commenter suggested that she should have handled it quietly, via an admonition to Romenesko and a directive to do things differently from here on out. Such doesn’t appear a feasible course for a site that preaches transparency every time a newspaper makes a big mistake or a public official stonewalls on a FOIA request.

Wemple further indicates that the discrepancies in the way Romenesko used attribution were brought to Moor's attention by the Columbia Journalism Review. It was only after that point that she began to look into it.

I'm not sure I would arrive at the conclusion that greed was Moor's motivation, given this description of events.

You (and Wemple) are two steps behind.

CJR's Erika Fry emailed Moos saying, in essence, "hey, I have some background questions for a piece I'm writing about Poynter, which I am interviewing you about this week. I noticed Romenesko+ (the blog that includes multiple writers) now does X, Y, and Z. It didn't used to. What is the deal? Doesn't doing that kind of constitute over-aggregation?"

Then Moos jumped in front and publicly chewed out Jim Romenesko for attribution issues - *not* over-aggregation - while not answering the rest of her questions. And it's worth noting that Jim Romenesko was not the only person to have adopted this style on the blog - the other contributors often did too, but Fry hadn't happened to use them as examples because she did a quick perusal of the last two weeks of the blog to make her (different) point to Moos. Yet Moos never bothered to do any of her own legwork here to find them. Instead she just bitched out Jim Romenesko.

Fry to Moos: "Uh, hi. Can I have that interview now? And what does yelling at Romenesko about attribution do to fix the over-aggregation problem I'm asking you about? Putting everything in quotes doesn't do anything to get people to read the original story. You're still copying-and-pasting large, multiple-paragraph chunks of the writer's work onto Poynter's website."

Moos: "I already answered your questions in the blog post." (Which she hadn't, not all of them.)

As for why Poynter wanted a style change in Romenesko+: what besides greed can explain it? Romenesko worked great when it was just giving people two sentences and having them click through for the rest. It just didn't soak up the eyeballs for Poynter because nobody in their audience gave a shit about reading lots of their analysis.

Edited November 14, 2011 by Big Wheel

[papsrus]

Thanks for that. Interesting. Still, given the events as you've laid them out, I'm not convinced that they lead to the inevitable conclusion that "greed" was the primary motivation for non-profit Poynter in all this, nor, for that matter, that "nobody in their audience gave a shit about reading lots of their analysis."

You're certainly welcome to that opinion, and I'm sure you're not alone. And as I said, perhaps you're right. Perhaps not.