(from http://davidsimon.com/michael-olesker-is-a-plagiarist-who-isnt/)
". . . “Once upon a deadline dreary . . . ”. . . The author, an alumnus of the University of MarylandDiamondback, had butchered “The Raven,” evoking the gothic plight of a journalist trapped at a typewriter, trying to keep his work fresh as he exhausted new developments in the top few paragraphs and was reduced to recounting backstory. To conclude each stanza, the haunting voice came to him: “Rewrite the background, ever more.” “No,” wails the reporter, “I will not burden my tale with all that came before.” “Rewrite the background, ever more.” . . . On the police beat, on general assignment, and especially on the rewrite desk, you were usually reacting to new developments on stories that were ongoing for days or months. You would quickly marry the fresh stuff to what had already been reported, more often than not by other staffers. You relied on info from the newspaper library, working your way through old clips, changing a word or two, flipping a sentence with a dependent clause, or, if you needed to lift a large chunk, restructuring a few paragraphs. . . So I am a plagiarist. And if we agree to the definition implied in both City Paper’s coverage of the Olesker imbroglio (Media Circus, Jan. 4. 2006) and the Sun’s response, then perhaps every rewrite man is a plagiarist. So, too, for reporters who routinely write stories using morgue clippings for background, or who work to catch up on a competitor’s reportage and err by not independently confirming every single detail. So, too, for every columnist who ever used reported material—either his own newspaper’s or that of another—as the given terrain on which to maneuver. . . A lot of people need to be fired, apparently. There may be scribes confident of their day-after-day, year-after-year output, who are sure no paragraph they ever used as background is too similar to its source, who are certain that whenever they reworked another paper’s story every fact was reconfirmed. But there are others—many others—who, in reflecting on Olesker’s fate, will privately admit unease. . . Journalism is not scholarship. While reporting requires integrity and precision, it is not a world of footnotes, textual cites, and bibliographic acknowledgment, and the news report of any major daily is a communal property. . ."
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