Dagbladet and Dagens Næringsliv picked up Lars Ruben Hirsch's story today about the plagiarized article in Aftenposten. Unlike Lars Ruben, Dagbladet's Jan Thoresen was able to get a response from Aftenposten - a rather deceptive apology. Take a look at this:

Foreign news chief Per Kristian Haugen apologizes that they've been unable to respond to the criticism because they were on vacation. And he admits that the article could have been better credited.

- As a rule sources should be credited. This has partly been done here, but it could have been done more thoroughly, he says to Dagbladet.no.

When he was made aware of the criticism in the weblog, he contacted the journalist.

- He has pointed to several sources for his article. Some of these sources may also have been Newsweek's sources, he says.

The sources were a column in O Globo on Latin American challenges. He has furthermore used Folha do Sao Paulo, Jornal do Brasil, as well as the magazines Veja, Istoé and Carta.

- It must be legitimate to point at these common issues. But the article could have credited sources more clearly, Haugen says.

I wish he hadn't said that. See, here's what should have happened: Blogger discovers plagiarism. Newspaper is notified of plagiarism. Newspaper slaps reporter on the wrist and flags him as someone who will require extra monitoring in the future. Case closed, for now.

But Aftenposten just had to deny it. Very well, then. "Some of these sources may also have been Newsweek's sources". Eh. When I wrote about this earlier I did a sentence by sentence comparison of the two articles, to check that Lars Ruben was right. Which he was. I marked sections where Halvorsen said the same thing as Johnson but with more/fewer/different words in green, and all sections where he said the same thing in nearly the same way and with equivalent Norwegian words in yellow. I've now updated that comparison and placed it on a separate page. First the quotes side by side, then in the context of the full articles: Arne Halvorsen vs Scott Johnson

This isn't an exciting or necessary read - this whole thing is just embarassing - (and I haven't translated anything - for that see Lars Ruben's blog), but browsing the comparison will give you an idea of just how derivative Halvorsen's article is of Johnson's. I've been more forgiving than I was the first time, and changed a few sections from yellow to green, but the conclusion remains that apart from four paragraphs at the end nearly all the content of Halvorsen's article is taken from Newsweek.

There were clearly other sources than Newsweek here. The quote from Mark Weibrot is longer in Halvorsen's version, so he has looked it up somewhere. Same with the lynching story. But this is not what an article that summarizes the content of several other articles looks like. This is not something a writer with integrity would publish as his own thoughts.

Aftenposten needs to come clean here, not because this one case is so horrible, but because they're sending a bad signal to their reporters by ignoring it. "We have never experienced such a detailed scrutiny before", Per Kristian Haugen says to Dagbladet. Yes, and your reporters know that. Now they also know you'll come to their defense if they're caught stealing.

I've got nothing much to add, except that I still don't see what the ruckus is all about. I still don't think it's plagiarizing.

Rune-Kristian: "I still don't think it's plagiarizing."

Then I'm curious how much he'd have to copy before it becomes plagiarism. Do you agree that the yellow quotes are so similar to the original that they were almost certainly written with that it front of him? The green ones aren't so bad by themselves, but there are so many of them, and there is so little left when you remove them. Certainly nothing of the core of the article. All Halvorsen has added is decoration.

I don't know the formal newspaper definition of plagiarism vs "poor creditation", but I know one thing: If I had written this thing, I'd be embarassed to put my name on it. Wouldn't you?

I have to agree with Rune here - this is not plagiarism, just a highly derivative piece. While its argument rests heavily on the Newsweek piece, there ARE other sources, as you yourself point out. You're correct in stating that several passages are very similar to ones found in the Newsweek piece, but these are mostly factual statements, and journalese isn't the most flexible of styles anyway (as an excercise, try expressing the same facts and arguments with the same emphasis in a journalistic style, and make it NOT bear a similarity to the original article).

At any rate, the concept of authorship in journalism just isn't the same as in the arts - after all, you are describing the same physical reality as your colleagues, and the chief priority is getting the story across to your readers. As a journalist, you WILL often have to rely on and paraphrase second-hand information from news agencies and other media, and in the daily press, sources are seldom comprehesively credited. What makes this a questionable piece of journalism is primarily that it was published within the context of an opinion/analysis piece without giving Scott Johnson a nod, but that's not to say it constitutes outright plagiarism. Lazy? Yes. Sloppy? Yup. Unethical? Not really.

Gaute: If you write about something that has just happened, or a statement by a politician, there aren't that many ways to say it. I agree. But this isn't a news article, it's an analysis, where you bring together facts from separate sources and interpret them. You're meant to do research, and think, and write.

How do you believe this was written? How do you believe this amazing similarity between the words, the examples and the quotes was achieved?

All the heavy work here, it seems to me, was done by Scott Johnson. All the original thinking is his, most of the original research, and many of the original words. Halvorsen expands on a quote and an anecdote, but he didn't dig up that quote and anecdote on his own. The summary at the beginning didn't require any original thinking, and the different and mostly original ending doesn't make the article up to that point any more original.

"Lazy? Yes. Sloppy? Yup. Unethical? Not really."

Then what is your definition of unethical, or of plagiarism? If it is that every single part of the article is equal to the original then only dumb plagiarizers will get caught. Anyone can dress up a plagiarization like this one. The question is whether you do actual original _work_ or just add some final touches to somebody else's work.

To take an existing article almost paragraph by paragraph, do a rewrite of some of them, copying others verbatim, but essentially reproducing the ideas of the original article, is plagiarism.

In fact, it is easier to translate approximately than accurately, so I find no mitigating circumstances here at all.

Jan Well said

Bjørn: I think we agree on the basics here, just not on the exact definition of plagiarism within journalism. I would concede that this might be a borderline case, but I maintain that there are looser standards of what is and isn't plagiarism in news and current affairs coverage than within other genres of prose, where the issue of authorship may be more relevant to the actual reading. Technically, since Halvorsen had other sources, his work isn't a simple ripoff, but he should definitely have had the decency to work a reference to Johnson's article into the text.

My position that this isn't really all that unethical rests on a pragmatic view of how the media works. Norwegian news media have few foreign correspondents, and so must rely a lot on news agencies and other, larger news corporations for input. With the advent of web news media and 24 hour news coverage, the pressure on journalists and editors to publish news material has increased significantly. It's naive to think that Norwegian journalists originate all their material themselves, and if you look around the Norwegian papers' websites, you'll find lots of copy just written off the wires or referenced more or less directly from international, English-language news services, though most of the time this is stated. Moreover, if you take a look at feature and background stories published by Norwegian newspapers, especially online, I think you'll find that quite a few of these stories correspond with similar, recently published pieces from international sources. Dagbladet, for instance, seems to me to have snapped up a lot of articles from the British weekly The Observer for its feature articles under the Magasinet header.

So, I'm sorry, but Halvorsen walks as far as I'm concerned, if only on a techinality. He may have been sloppy, lazy and inconsiderate not to include a reference to his primary source, but his main obligation to his readers is to get the story across, not originate completely original material.

Jan: Copying and/or rewriting would constitute plagiarism within academia and arts, certainly, but a journalist's output isn't held up to the same standards, and is not considered original work in the same way as an academical paper is. The distinctions between relying heavily on a source and outright copying it may be somewhat fuzzy in day-to-day journalistic practice.

Rune, Gaute:

If it were a regular news article, I could perhaps agree with you that this would have been a borderline case. As the piece was published as an Opinion ("Meninger"), which is supposed to be a more or less independent analysis, no way. You just don't steal the work of someone else and publish it as your own research.

Articles in The Economist, Newsweek and other international publications regularly pop up withouth references in Norwegian newspapers a week or two later.

Many years ago a Norwegian newspaper brought home a correspondent from NY because he only produced translations from NYT.

Instead of making vague apologies, the newspaper in question, Aftenposten, should look around for more honest and better journalists when plagiarisms are demonstrated. Furthermore, the threshold for accepting translated and rewritten articles as Op-Ed pieces in Norwegian newspapers, even with pro forma references, ougth to be rised substantially by the editors.

Lasse wrote:
Articles in The Economist, Newsweek and other international publications regularly pop up withouth references in Norwegian newspapers a week or two later.
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I haven't noticed that exactly but something similar. I've subcribed to The Economist for years and read five, six foreign newspapers online every day, plus a number of magazines, journals, etc. I see unnamed references often. I've actually thought of writing Aftenposten and asking them why should I bother reading their commentaries and opinion pieces when they're rehashes from other sources?

Regarding the plagiarism- I would think that journalists learn in learn in journalism school that palgiarism is an absolute no no - a firing offense.
In this particular case, we don't know what the repercussions are for Arne Halvorsen- what happened behind closed doors, so to speak. He might have gotten off with a mild scolding or been told that they're going to keep an eye on him and if anything close to this happens again, he'll be fired. I personally doubt the latter. After all, the guy might have a family, a mortgage, student loans and all those years invested in his profession. What's he going to do if he gets fired and can't work as a journalist anymore? Work in a warehouse? This is Norway. They can't let that happen.

Sadly this journalist confirms the old saying that journalism is the profession of those who dont know anything (de kunnskapsløses profesjon). Aftenposten should apologize for this very clear case of plagiarism.

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