Given Anderson's response that he screwed up and his plausible explanation, the article's gotcha title and the way that it's structured (first as a pompous "investigation", then springing this critical information on the reader at the end) strike me as a little unfair. Obviously what he did was wrong, but it was pretty clearly sloppiness rather than theft or deceit. (Edit: either that or a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.)
It is a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.
The publisher's PR team was on this faster than you can say media disaster. Get "Oops, I goofed" out there as quickly as possible while shifting blame to someone or something else (software, confusion over citation format, whatever).
If this happened to one of Anderson's own writers at Wired, I suspect he or she would be out of a job just as quickly.
Note to tech bloggers: want a story that gets hits this week? Find an example of someone sacked from Wired for plagiarism and run a compare/contrast of their iniquity vs. this one.
You won't get free boot-stomping journalism, but you can get free analysis (see DeLong, Yglesias, Instapundit, Duncan Black, McArdle, Archpundit, I could go on).
Example: there's someone out there who can explain why Daley flopped on the Olympic guarantee - did he want to? Pretty clearly no. Did he have to? Pretty clearly yes. But, instead, we get more of the same "oh, that Daley, he shits on the city".
The issue is - will people work for free for someone else? As far as I can tell, the only community doing that online is at DailyKos. Am I wrong?
College Humor, Cracked, JPGMag. It's all about the incentives. The Citizen's just not there yet. The big shift from blogging to aggregation around new year's was in part prompted by me sending 3 writers to Grant Park on election night and having none of them send back stories "because it was crowded." As they were "citizen journalists" I had no leverage or way to hold them accountable. In retrospect this seems obvious, but it was a wakeup call. Can't run a business on volunteer writing, gotta get some central thing running consistently and without fail, i.e. the aggregator.
Except that "crime" and "plagiarism" imply (to my mind) an intent to deceive, or at least acting consciously. That doesn't strike me as very likely. It would mean that Anderson is an idiot in at least two ways: thinking he wouldn't get caught ripping stuff off Wikipedia, and taking a big risk for trivial gain.
This. How on earth you could have an explanation that's essentially "I relied on my memory to figure out the quoted cites after the fact that I deleted the cites because I couldn't find a fucking cite format" is insane. The dude pretty willfully plagarized as far as I'm concerned. I mean, seriously, fucking Google has this as their first hit for [cite online sources]: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html
Now, look, Doris Kearns Goodwin got nailed plagarizing, too. She did her penance, and now she's back on TV and everything after putting out Team of Rivals, which was seminal. Anderson will have to do something similar.
What's striking is that if you make it to the top of the profession, you can get away with this. If you're 28 and toiling to work your way up, it's a death sentence.
"Training as a journalist" is a joke. Pretty much every article I've had firsthand knowledge of has contained errors so egregious that it wouldn't take any training at all to have avoided them, only basic intelligence and diligence. Sorry, but that profession richly deserves its current collapse.
Given that, I find Anderson's screwup with footnotes no more objectionable than the critic's self-interested attempt to drum up a scandal out of it. It's not like the book gains anything by not citing a few Wikipedia articles; given its genre (popular economics) it would in fact be more convincing with them than without them. If it were claiming original scholarship it would be a different story.
Anyway, my point isn't really to defend authorial sloppiness in shallow throwaway bestsellers. I just didn't like the bait-and-switch in the gotcha piece. (Or its self-importance. "Investigation?" Please.)
Edit: ok, my conscience made me go back and reread the VQR piece to see if it was all that obnoxious. And it says it wasn't really and I have to add that here. In a footnote. :)
I'm not sure they were better. They might have deserved it for a long time. :)
The MSM does seem to be getting worse to me, but this might be an optical illusion - an effect of the contrast with how much better its emerging replacement is.
See, that's a valid view. People are welcome to think they're all getting what they deserve. I just don't think it makes sense to connect the quality or perceived lack of quality of today's mainstream journalism to the financial straights of the big media companies.
