Tuesday, February 16, 2010

NYT's Zachery Kouwe, in 2008 Email, Declared That Readers "Don't Care About" Newspapers Giving Credit To Other Publications.

In December 2008, NYT business reporter Zachery Kouwe was accused by a business-news website of taking its scoop about a financial-services merger, and publishing it in the NYT as his original reporting.

The website complained to Kouwe and his boss, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of theNYT's Dealbook blog, where the scoop appeared. Sorkin never replied, but -- according to a detailed account of the episode that appeared on the Greenwich Time website this afternoon -- Kouwe replied that he didn't feel it was necessary to credit the original source of a news story.

"Readers just don't care," Kouwe told the website's editors in the email reply. "They don't read bylines and they don't care about whether one paper cited a website or another paper in their stories."

But websites did care. On January 12, 2009, the website Dealbreaker got the NYT's Dealbook blog to acknowledge that Kouwe had stolen its scoop -- about a joint venture between Citigroup and Morgan Stanley -- and represented as his own.

An Editor's Note appeared on the NYT's Dealbook blog that day, acknowledging that Kouwe had stolen his scoop from the Dealbreaker website:

DealBreaker first broke the news of the memo on its Web site. A DealBook reporter confirmed the memo’s authenticity with Citigroup’s press office and posted a copy of the memo from Dealbreaker’s Web site. A link to the original DealBreaker post should have been included.

Today's Greenwich Time story strongly implies that the NYT must have been aware of the repeated allegations against Kouwe, who frequently reported stories that first appeared on the Dealbreaker website.

The writer of the Greenwich Time account -- the first to report on these allegations against Kouwe over stolen scoops -- was written by Teri Buhl, who is identified as having freelanced for Dealbreaker and Implode-O-Meter before joining the staff of Hearst CT Newspapers. It was Implode-o-Meter whose emails prompted Kouwe's above admission that he routinely didn't give credit to other sources for their scoops.

"I don't know what to tell you," Kouwe wrote to Implode-O-Meter in response to their objection. "Things move so quickly on the Web that citing who had it first is something that is likely going away, especially in the age of blogs."

More likely to go away first is Kouwe himself, whose fate is reportedly being decided as this is written, at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, less than 48 hours after an Editor's Note first alleged that Kouwe had plagiarized portions of articles in the WSJ and elsewhere.

The Greenwich Time story reports that Kouwe has told friends "he doesn't think the NYT can afford to keep him on staff and assumes responsibility now for his actions."

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting....this is a mantra often repeated by reporters at the NYPost, which often picks up info from other sources, but rarely gives credit to them. "Readers don't care about where a story came from," they say when reporters complain about lack of attribution. Sounds like Kouwe might have tried to apply NYPost's rules to NYTimes efforts. Very different animals

Anonymous said...

why did the NYT hire from the NYP anyway? Are there not more reputable news orgs from which to hire? Jeez

Anonymous said...

Frankly, an organization that promotes no-gooders who have this Kouwe's attitude, while it hinders those who don't treat the reader like an imbecile, is biased to the core, and whereas News Corp's ideology is to dumben down the intellectual elite, one would hope NYT has everything to lose standing on such a lookout.

Anonymous said...

I'd be curious to have the NYTPicker weigh in on this: If you independently verify a story first reported elsewhere (i.e. call and get the same boilerplate spokesman statement), are you really still supposed to cite them as having scooped you? Not defending the pretty clear-cut examples of plagiarism the WSJ picked up on, but this is a much more fluid rule, it seems to me -- not only for us Web-only journalists, who are trying to seem more legitimate all the time, but for the vaunted NYT itself, which constantly steals story ideas (Dan Barry) or information first reported on blogs (Marcy Wheeler being the first of us to get a serious cite). At our site, the decision to link or to report out seems to vary on a case-by-case basis, so I'm curious what you guys believe to be "the right way."

Anonymous said...

It looks like this reporter had a history of using the work of other reporters from other newspapers. I suspect that if you look at his history as a reporter, he has done this alot. He has to go. I would also bet the ranch that he will be treated alot more harshly than Maureen Dowd was treated by the Times brass. Dowd could get away with stealing the words and thoughts of Josh Marshal's blog because Dowd is a politcally correct columnist. Dowd and her supporters would have cried sexism or censorship had she been disciplined in any way. The useless Clark Hoyt wrote one indecipherable setence about the Dowd theft of Marshal's intellectual property. Someone noted elsewhere on this site that Gail Collins ripped off a whole Jay Leno comedy routine about the difference between men and women. The Boston Globe fired a columnist for using two lines from George Carlin but Gail Collins skated on by, blissfully accepting credit for Jay Leno's cleverness. So maybe at the Times, it depends on whether you are a big fish (Colins, Dowd) or a guppie (Kouwe). Kouwe merits discipline but so do Dowd and Collins.

Anonymous said...

Your'e right about Gail Collins. The Times will never ask her about "borrowing" from Jay Leno.

Anonymous said...

Roger Cohen has ripped off Anthony Lewis several times. Whatever one thought of Tony Lewis's ideas, at least he was a graceful writer. Cohen just copies Tony Lewis's prose and makes it boring.

Anonymous said...

About 15 years ago, Anthony Lewis wrote a column called "Eyeless in Gaza". A few months ago, Roger Cohen used the phrase as if he thought it up himself. Rummaging through back issues of retired columnists is really undignified

Anonymous said...

In re Lewis, Cohen, et al...

The editors write the headlines. So if the authorship of "Eyeless in Gaza" is dispute, you can look to the unknown editors. It's entirely possible that the same editor wrote both headlines.

Also, copyright law doesn't recognize copyrights for titles. So it's not clear that it counts as plagiarism either, any more than someone who calls their son "Charles" is plagiarizing from the the Prince of England who, of course, got his name from a long list of forebearers. Sigh.

PB said...

That was some really good reporting on Kouwe's history of scoop stealing by Teri Buhl. It's great she brought these details out in the public light because you know Kouwe's other media friends at the NYO and TBI just tried to go light on this important subject.

Anonymous said...

There have been numerous incidents in which columnists at the Times have used the words of others and sometimes themselves and yet there is no discipline. There was the Maureen Dowd outright theft of Josh Marhsal's blog comments. Dowd came up with the preposterous defense that a friend of hers (who she would not name) gave her the idea for a clever paragraph and never told her (Dowd) that she was paraphrasing from Josh Marshal. How likely is it that this unknown friend would A) tell her about a paragraph in a Josh Marshal blog 2) and not tell her that the thought was from Josh Marshal and 3) tell Dowd the exact words that Josh Marshal used and that Dowd would remember the exact words when she wrote her column. If Dowd were not a protect class at the Times she would be gone for ripping off Josh Marshal. Whether one agrees with Mr. Marshal's politics, we can all agree that he is very clever in his use of language and should not be ripped off without attribution. And then there was Gail Collins stealing jokes from Jay Leno and passing them off as her own and Roger Cohen lifting a phrase here and there from Anthony Lewis. At least Tom Friedman reuses his own old columns. That is laziness and his editor should demand more but at least it is not theft of someone else's work. Heads should roll at the Times.

Anonymous said...

i follow the nyt, wsj, and the ft. if you ask me, when it comes to giving credit to others, the ft is the most stingy.

case in point: when wsj reporter broke story on green dam internet filter in china last year, nyt gave wsj credit but the ft didn't.

this is just one example. there are many more.