Needed: a policy on Web attribution

BY Aloke Thakore| IN Opinion | 15/05/2007

Hammer and Tongs

ALOKE THAKORE

A curious clarification made its way into the May 10, 2007 edition of the Mumbai Mirror. On page 36, there was small single column clarification, which read: "I want to clarify that yesterday’s article, ‘Tarantino likes the cop-y and robber tale’ was taken from passionforcinema.com. I did not have any conversation with Subhash K Jha. Srinivas, which was followed by] My sincere apologies to Srinivas. Subhash K Jha." Since there was no editorial clarification, it made sense to see whether this was a case of plagiarism, and/or Mr Jha cooked up a conversation that purportedly took place between Mr Jha and Mr Srinivas. And if either was the case, was just an apology to Mr Srinivas enough to exculpate Mr Subhash K Jha who is as ubiquitous as the biggest stars on the entertainment pages of Indian newspapers.

The piece in question, which had appeared a day earlier on May 9, 2007, was a report of an interview that was conducted by Mr Srinivas to which Mr Jha had added some quotes from an Indian filmmaker who has ‘copied’ the film by Mr Tarantino. Mr Jha clearly mentioned that the interview was "conducted by a short film director Srinivas at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles…" It becomes clear that the clarification from Mr Srinivas that the article was taken from passionforcinema does not hold because Mr Jha’s piece was not a case of plagiarism. In fact, he attributed the contents of the interview to Mr Srinivas. The question, however, remains about the manner in which Mr Jha gained access to this interview. As Mr Srinivas mentions, he did not speak to Mr Jha. Hence, it may be reasonably assumed that Mr Jha saw the story on the website, took the excerpts, added some additional material, and wrote up the piece.

The party that ought to have taken the most offence here is not Mr Srinivas, but the website, www.passionforcinema.com, from where the excerpts were used without giving due credit. One wonders, then, whether Mr Jha should have been apologizing to Mr Srinivas or to those who run the site. The clarification, one needs to add, did little to enlighten the readers on the nature of the editorial misdemeanour and hence, only may have confused readers and wrongly given the impression that Mr Jha plagiarized, when he ought to have provided adequate attribution. Since Mr Jha is one whose pieces appear with unfailing and almost, what seems like, page-filling regularity in the entertainment pages, it is not an unreasonable expectation that he would know that some mention of the place where this interview had first appeared should have been in the story. Even if he were not to mention that website, the least that he should have said is that in an interview, actually it was just a chance conversation that was being reported, that has appeared on a website the director said…

The reason why this issue is of utmost importance is because of two related attribution issues that plague, the choice of that term is not inappropriate, our newspapers. Invariably, newspapers tend to carry stories based on things that have been reported first by a television news channel. Instead of mentioning the name of the news channel, only the fact it was reported on a news channel is told. One can argue that this is accurate, but what is the purpose of not mentioning the channel. Sometimes it may be that the channel is in competition with one owned by the newspaper. But often it is just a case of not mentioning the name of another news reporting organization.

Even more problematic, however, is the case where information from various websites are regularly used and rewritten, especially in the feature pieces. Often when stories require the use of knowledge that is not available in the newsroom, typically the health, fitness, beauty, history, technology, and medicine stories, the norm is to rely on a web search engine, get to a site where the information is available and then rewrite or rework the copy. Most of these stories do not mention the names of these websites, and if some words from these stories are typed into the search engines, the results might be embarrassing. (The reliance on web has reached such proportions that a recent editorial in the Business Standard used wikipedia to define "influence" ("Influential List, May 6, 2007). Presumably the leader writer could not explain the idea of influence any other way.)

The issue that editors need to discuss and inform the readers is what is the appropriate way of using information on the web. The Internet is like a metalibrary, which provides access to sources of information. When the same information is available from many sources, like word meanings or years of historical events, there is no need for mentioning the source. However, when information, which is available only from one source, or which is contentious and has been put together from a few sources, is used then the mention of the source or sources is imperative. And in the case, such as the one mentioned here where Mr Jha took the information from a website, there is little doubt that he is guilty of a journalistic misdemeanour. The sooner that news organizations arrive at a policy for treating website as sources, more easily will cases of inaccurate attribution and plagiarism be discovered. That sharing such policies with readers will marginally help the case of building credibility among the laity would be an added benefit.

(I am temporarily associated with Mumbai Mirror as a consultant. I was not aware of the circumstances surrounding the publication of the piece and the subsequent clarification. The views are based on my professional judgement and are entirely personal.) 

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