Newspapers, Plagiarism | featured news

Has technology made us all plagiarists? The Internet and Google have enabled every reporter, blogger and columnist to have what amounts to a million encyclopedias at their fingertips. We can search for material on virtually any subject and download a cornucopia of information in seconds to inform us before we begin using more traditional reporting tools.

Continuing questions about Journatic’s ethics and business practices came into sharp focus earlier this month with the discovery that it had supplied a story to the Chicago Tribune’s TribLocal edition that contained allegedly plagiarized and fabricated elements. The concerns first emerged when National Public Radio’s “This American Life” broadcast a story showing how Journatic used cut-rate staff in the Philippines to write stories using fake, American-sounding names.