The plagiarism case that shook the New York Times to its foundations

Go to this page for links to New York Times stories related to the Jayson Blair plagiarism case.

• The best book on the subject is Hard News, by Seth Mnookin. It's available in the Commits library. Hard News also gives you an amazing insight into how one of the world's great newspapers works.

• And here's the NYT's national editor Suzanne Daley (pictured) answering a reader's question about the case:

    The Legacy of Jayson Blair

Q. Is it too soon to ask about the legacy of Jayson Blair for the National Desk? Do you think The Times learned the right lessons? Is it possible for a news organization, stung so badly, to become too cautious in its pursuit of the news?
    — Donald Frazier, Denver
 

A. I don’t think anyone around here is going to thank Jayson Blair any time soon for the shame he brought to this institution. But much good came out of his deplorable behavior. His legacy permeates our newsroom.

    In the aftermath of Mr. Blair’s fabrications, we did a lot of soul searching and developed all sorts of new policies and training on ethics, conflict of interest, anonymous sourcing.

    We now have a public editor, Clark Hoyt, who takes in complaints from the public and publishes weekly critiques of our work. We also have a high-level editor inside the newsroom, who is responsible for standards and ethics. On top of that, each desk must track its errors and who made them. I get monthly summaries so I can identify the worst trespassers on the National Desk.

    We also decided to be a lot more transparent about who was contributing to the stories in our paper. When I started here, there were all kinds of crazy byline rules, grandfathered in long ago for who knows what reason. There was a policy, for instance, that you were only allowed one byline in the paper even if you had written two stories (even on the front page.) And only staff reporters could have bylines at all in the news sections. That meant a sizable number of stories had no bylines and a reader could not tell who wrote or reported them. Now, we spell it all out in sometimes lengthy contributor boxes.

    And we have increased our efforts to respond to the public with features like "Talk to the Newsroom."

    Have we become too cautious? Nope. Not in my book.

• For more Q&A with Suzanne Daley, go here. 

UPDATE (August 2, 2013): Commitscion ASWATHY MURALI (Class of 2015) has made the valuable suggestion that there should be something on the Reading Room blog about the hoax that shook the Washington Post to its foundations: "Jimmy's World", the story by Janet Cooke that won her a Pulitzer Prize but was later proved to be a fabrication. You can get all the details on "Story Lab", a very interesting blog published by the newspaper: Story pick: Janet Cooke and "Jimmy's World".

(What is Story Lab?  According to the "About" page, this is "where readers and reporters will come together to create and shape stories. Washington Post writers will talk about some of the hard choices involved in journalism". Read the description in its entirety here.)

Also read:

• "The problem of plagiarism"

• "The India Today plagiarism scandal — and an apology of sorts"

• "Plagiarism is okay, says DNA executive editor in an apology for a column"

"How TV news is distorting India's media"

This is a 2006 post by a BBC South Asia bureau editor, but some of the points he is making are still valid.

• If you go to the end, you will see he has a dig at himself too.

I asked Ayesha Tabassum (Class of 2007), who is a producer with Times Now in Mumbai, to comment on this piece. Here's her feedback:

It's a fair picture he has given about the current situation in television news. But certain points seem to be exaggerated...

LIKE THIS ONE:

The former Home Minister Indrajit Gupta was one day doggedly pursued by a young journalist on his way out of parliament.

When he finally agreed to stop for the news crew, he was asked the probing question. "Sir, would you please say something". The second question was "and Sir, who are you?"

No channel would send out a reporter who is ignorant about the basic facts... even if you are not active on the field you cannot afford to ignore basic facts and information about your government and ministers or any other topic under the sun. Google is always out there to help you out (Wikipedia is not always reliable, though).

BUT THIS ONE:

One young woman described herself in the opening line of her CV to my office as being "young and vivacious".

HAPPENS WAY TOO OFTEN

Particularly at Hindi news channel offices (sorry to sound biased but, trust me, it happens most of the times).

How do you get a one-on-one interview with someone who has been on the run from the law?

"[Koteshwar] Rao has been on the run from law enforcement bodies for 31 years and is guarded by a protective circle of 25 bodyguards. The 51-year-old Maoist leader refused to be photographed and set his own terms for the meeting. Mint’s reporters were asked to arrive at a school in Chakadoba where they waited for around 5 hours. At around dusk, they were escorted to where Rao was — a clearing in the jungle that was reached after a brisk 30-minute walk."

Read the full interview by Romita Datta and Aveek Datta in Mint here.

• Photo courtesy: Mint

• UPDATE (NOVEMBER 25, 2011): Koteshwar Rao, better known as Kishanji, was killed yesterday in a gun battle with security forces in West Bengal. Read details here.

Here's a well-written feature from the WSJ...

...on how "rural advertising comes to life in India". Note the micro-to-macro approach. Eric Bellman begins his feature by telling us about wedding singer turned travelling salesman Sandeep Sharma before going on, in the fifth paragraph, to enlighten us on the lavish spending habits of India's rural consumers.

"What should be done about Americanisms?"

What I admire about The National, a newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, is, first, its neat and clean look; second, its attention to detail; and, third, its obsession with good writing. We have copies in the library — when you read it, you will quickly realise that the stories follow the rules we discuss in class.

The language column in The National is a must-read for all those interested in improving their writing skills. My Word, is written by the paper's executive editor, Colin Randall, a former Telegraph (UK) journalist. We have often discussed in class the use of Americanisms — here's Randall's take.

Go here for his latest columns, including one on exclamations.

A savvy, must-watch documentary on the peerless P. Sainath

For three decades, he has written about the impact of "development" on the rural poor. In 2007, he won the Magsaysay Award. And he is currently the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu.

Now he is also the subject of a new documentary Nero's Guests produced by his former student, who has been filming him since 2004.

Here's an excerpt from an interview in Time Out Bengaluru with the documentary maker, Deepa Bhatia:

P. Sainath is notoriously averse to being filmed. How did you manage to make a documentary about him?

Finnish documentary commissioning editor Iikka Vehkalahti has known Sainath for a very long time and he has been trying to get Sainath to be a part of a film for years, but Sainath consistently refused. I met Iikka and I told him, let’s start filming Sainath and see where it goes. Sainath was reporting very aggressively at that time on the agrarian crisis. He would go to the countryside and I would shoot him or get him filmed. I shot sporadically, without any intent of making a film or knowing what it would be about.

• Find out more about Nero's Guests here.
• Mint's Lounge supplement has also published a brief article on the documentary.
• I have bought a copy of the DVD for the college — among the many important reasons for our AVC students to watch it: learn how to make a documentary on a public figure tacking a public crisis.
• Photo courtesy: Time Out Bengaluru

Shivram Sujir (Class of 2011) watched the documentary a few days ago. Here's his take on Nero's Guests:

This is one of those documentaries that every so-called 'educated' citizen in India should watch. The one who thinks India is all about information technology. The one who takes pride in the fact that our GDP growth is the highest. The one who feels great that we are one of the fastest growing economies of the world and is enthralled by the idea of globalisation.

Magsaysay award winner P. Sainath, whose work is the subject of this documentary, may come across as a grumpy, angry, and frustrated man but what else can you expect of a warrior who has been fighting a lone battle for three decades watching his countrymen fall one by one to the arrows of corporatisation and industrialisation? His account of how our definition of development has caused complete devastation in the lives of farmers and led to the agrarian crisis is like a tête-à-tête with the real India and the slow death she is dying at the hands of Nero's guests.

Wonder who Nero's guests are? Watch the documentary. You'll be surprised.

• Nero's Guests is now available on YouTube; watch it here.

The best writing tip of all time: Sit

Having trouble getting the writing done?

Chip Scanlan of Poynter Online, the best resource for journalists that I know of, has some helpful advice for you.

Here's what Stephen King has to say about The Elements Of Style...

...in his wonderful book, On Writing:

SECOND FOREWORD: This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do — not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.

One notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course, its short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is "Omit needless words." I will try to do that here.

MORE GEMS FROM ON WRITING

• The adverb is not your friend. (Page 117)
• The best form of dialogue attribution is "said", as in "he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said". (Page 120)
• If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I am aware of, no shortcut. (Page 139)
• If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. (Page 142)
• The real importance of reading... (Page 145; please buy On Writing to read more.)

(Photo courtesy: Stephen King website)

• On Writing was reviewed in Your Opinion by co-editor Padmini Nandy Mazumder, Class of 2011. 

ADDITIONAL READING (September 30, 2012): "A Brief History of The Elements of Style and What Makes It Great".

Have you tried Google Squared?

"Google Squared takes a category and creates a starter 'square' of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web." Should be helpful for your PowerPoint presentations at Commits.

Can you imagine writing a feature on Kolkata's street typists?

Rajdeep Datta Roy does a good job of it in Mint's Lounge. Here's an excerpt:

While those who sit in the business district and near the courts are comparatively better off, the typists who ply their trade in neighbourhoods such as the Shyambazar crossing, under the watchful eyes of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose astride a stallion, are finding it difficult to make ends meet. “Typists working in a bureau don’t have to worry about the space or the machines but, in turn, have to part with almost 50% of their meagre earnings,” says Sushil Das, who works in a bureau.

Read the feature here.

• Mint was launched in Kolkata in June 2009.