WaPo scapegoating blogger

A Washington Post blogger resigned after plagiarizing others' work on two separate occasions. The copypasta, however, was done under working conditions that make the newspaper look worse than her. WaPo ombudsman Patrick Pexton takes a swipe at his employers for getting 6 traditionally-styled stories a day out of her.

On many days Flock was the only reporter filing ... These are not 100-word briefs but often 500-word summaries of complicated news events... Flock made two mistakes in the past four months, which earned her two tough editor’s notes disavowing her actions. ...

It appears that she copied, pasted and slightly rewrote two paragraphs from [a] Discovery story. Plagiarism perhaps, but also a perpetual danger in aggregated stories. After Discovery News raised objections, Flock resigned voluntarily. She said that the mistakes were hers. She said it was only a matter of time before she made a third one; the pressures were just too great.

Katharine Zaleski, WaPo's executive director of digital news, was in hard form: "The Washington Post’s standards apply every bit as much to our digital work as they do to our print edition. And our bloggers honor that.” Pexton implies that Zaleski failed her, however, because there's no cultivating environment or mentoring there.

Both of them are masking the real problem. It isn't about talent cultivation and it isn't really about honoring standards. The problem is that the Washington Post wants to have the cake and eat it too. It is content-farming mountains of coverage with overworked bloggers, but is too prideful to let them bang it out using approprately short blog-post formats.

The paragraphs in question should have simply been block-quoted with a link. This would have been less work than write-through plagiarism. But the pressure is to produce items with the superficial appearance of meatier, reported news stories. So that's what they get.

And when the lie shines though because the veneer is too thin? Scapegoat the writer instead of 'fessing up to the fact that they're belatedly following in Arianna's footsteps, and can't even get that right.

• [jere7my]

  You got yourself a bad bold closing tag there, after 6.

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    Cheers!

• [Mike Johnson]

  And hey, while you’re editing the post, the ombudsman name is Patrick Pexton — not Pexman, not Paxton. Or is it some sort of inside joke?

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    Just a brainfart. In my defense, I was watching Paxman on youtube.

    • [Michael Smith]

      You will get fewer typos if you make more use of the copy and paste function ;)

      • [Rob Beschizza]

        You see how bad it’s getting? I’m write-through plagiarizing PEOPLE’S NAMES. Change one vowel and it’s not copyright infringement; change two and it’s a remix.

        • [Rob Knop]

           Have you ever used a thesaurus?  That’s plagiarism at its most insidious: one word at a time.

• [koko szanel]

  She was paid for writing 3000 words a day and complaining how hard it was? Where do I sign up?

  • [Brad Zimmerman]

    Along with the, likely, hundreds of other journalists or journalism students trying to get a job at the Washington Post.

  • [mr_subjunctive]

    I believe the application is a unique 3000 word essay on “Why I Want to Work for the WaPo,” submitted to the Post every day for a month. Then they’ll let you know. 

  • [EH]

    Start with NaNoWriMo, which is 50,000 words in a month. Then, once you’re consistent with that, you can graduate to the 90,000/mo that the WaPo wants.

    • [Stephen Schenck]

       I sure hope they weren’t making her work seven days a week!

      More like 63k, methinks.

  • [NelC]

    Writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” 300 times doesn’t count.

• [Stephen Schenck]

  Speaking of journalistic oddities:

  Rob, you seem to have been going out of your way to avoid naming Elizabeth Flock in your write-up of the story – why is that? You name everyone else involved by their full names. When she is mentioned in the block quote, it’s jarring, because you hadn’t explained who Flock was yet.

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    I didn’t intentionally omit her name, but the reason I don’t talk about her is because the post isn’t really about about her. It’s about the Post, in whose content farming-style setup she is more or less an interchangeable component, readily scapegoated for the setup’s failures.

• [Rob Knop]

  Blaming the footsoldier when conditions lead footsoldiers to do bad things is just standard policy.  The same thing happened with torture at Abu Ghraib;  some of the individual soldiers who participated eventually got scapegoated and tried, but the brass that set the whole thing up, and the Administration that effectively pressured the military into doing this sort of thing, is off scot free.

• [David Witt]

  There’s a typo in the headline – it should be ‘WaPoo.’

• [Jan Angevine]

  No news is good news.

• [Guest]

  An environment where buyout offers are the norm would make for intense uncertainty and stress. It’s not hard to imagine someone making a mistake while fighting for their livelihood inside of an organization that is likely awash in eat-or-be-eaten attitude.

  I’m going a bit on what that ombudsman said, plus with the ridiculous number of times the word “professional” appears in the guidelines (LULZ!!!!), and with the ridiculous number of turn overs. It seems like this place is a giant corporate hatefest full of vipers who would throw you under the bus rather than face responsibility for their own inadequate editorial skills — or let me guess that you were too busy and stressed to initially notice the flaws in the writer’s two (of how many?) articles?

  I call for the editor’s head. The writer made two unrelated mistakes under what seems to be extreme pressure, and was then abandoned and steamrolled. Nice teamwork skills. Or let me guess, you’re going to blame your own corporate mess on the patriarchy? That would be fitting of the WaPo “professional” style, for certain. /me rolls eyes.

  So, I have to ask what’s slimier: The editorial hit squad, or the slippery slope that is the forgiveness of mistakes? And I’m the evil one? Give me a f**king break. Jeeze, I wonder why a near-extremist news organization was shunned by the Pulitzer committee.

  For what it’s worth, I hope that the writer finds a good job elsewhere and learns from their true mistake — corporate bulls**t is not something to be tolerated. I’m betting right now that there are a thousand people looking over the editor’s CV for unprofessional errors. Humans are mindlessly vicious like that when they perceive an injustice. It’s called the God archetype. Check it out.