Blogging plagiarism
Don't get so eager for hits that your integrity suffers!

Jeff Jarvis has bad news:

The Agonist admits to Wired.com that he lifted items from Statfor without credit or link on his web site.

The Wired story offers a three-web-page article that carries Agonist's author Sean-Paul Kelley's own admission that he plagiarized a huge quantity of material from Stratfor.com, a costly subscription service that claims to offer inside information on politico-military related matters from around the world.

Aside from a few scattered attributions, Kelley presented Stratfor's intelligence as information he had uncovered himself, typically paragraph-long reports detailing combat operations in Iraq. He took these wholesale from a Stratfor proprietary newsletter, U.S.-Iraqwar.com, which Kelley admits he subscribes to.

"Many postings on the (Agonist) pages I looked at are word-for-word verbatim," said Stratfor chief analyst Matthew Baker.

Kelley's plagiarism was first brought to light by a blogger who goes by the name General Roy. Last week, on his pro-war site, Strategic Armchair Command, Roy charged Kelley with nearly a dozen instances of plagiarizing Stratfor material over the course of a single day.

Roy says he noticed the plagiarism on March 31 when, because of technical difficulties on its website, Stratfor e-mailed its reports in bulk. The reports' same-day replication on The Agonist leaped off Roy's screen.

In return, says Wired, Kelley posted an answer, ""I really do wish I could cite all the sources here ... please understand the time constraints I am under."

Which sounds darn weak to me.

Kelley posted an apology on his site. He says he is back-attributing his posts. Posts today are attributed.

The Agonist's dated archives go back to Sept. 2002. The site's Sitemeter graph of visits since then reveal that the site's hit counts were pretty low until February, then rocketed in March, logging in more than 880,000 unique visits and almost two million page views that month. As Wired points out, Sean-Paul got major publicity (if not downright adoration) from major mainline media:

Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership . . . and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek online and National Public Radio.

In fairness, a small number of bloggers have gotten similar attention, but one thing that probably attracted Kelley to the media is the fact that until the invasion of Iraq, Kelley's posts reflected his liberal stance, of which this graphic is a good example. (Liberal yes, Leftist, no.)

After these appearances and citations, ISTM that Kelley got "hit happy." Major publicity always gives a blog a surge of hits, and it's gratifying for bloggers to experience. What was going through Kelley's mind when he decided to - deliberately - post enormous quantities of information pinched from other sources, presenting it as his own? I don't know, but I suspect is was a desire to keep the hit count high. He told Wired,

"I was trying to develop my own sources," he said. "If I could throw stuff out there to get some eyebrows raised as to 'who is this guy?' then I might get sent some encrypted e-mail." He was referring to the hope that high-level government and military sources might anonymously share information he could post on The Agonist.

But his method was a house of cards, and as Kelley discovered, it tumbled - a fall that is hard to sympathize with. On March 31, says Wired, he told an NPR interviewer that his

. . . obligation to the readers who flock to his site [is] "based on my reporting and my integrity." Asked about his editorial judgment, he referred to his graduate studies in international relations and said, "I feel I have a good sense of what's real and what's not."

Well, he seems to have that sense now, anyway. And let that be a lesson for us all.

Update: Glenn Reynolds links to Ken Layne's and Colby Cosh's commentaries on this issue, and they are worth reading. Ken basically says that kelley's offense is beyond the pale and that bloggers who have linked to him should unlink. A lively debate follows in his comments.

by Donald Sensing, 4/7/2003 03:16:24 PM. Permalink |