Category: press

When does copying text become plagiarism?

March 5, 2010 by Edmund Gall

Ever since attending primary school, I've been aware that copying someone's work was wrong.  At college - high school in North American parlance - I learnt about plagiarism.  I was reminded about it in university when compiling research and some months ago it was played out in T&T's political and press arenas with the accusation of plagiarism by a newpaper columnist / priest / potential Integrity Commission member.

Related to this, I learnt about attribution - if you're going to use someone's work in yours, then you need to highlight what you used, where you got it from and whose work it was.  In research, this is done through referencing.  In websites, you may use a copyright signature and embed a link to the original work.

I'm wondering what's the standard in T&T's media houses.  Sometimes, articles would have the writer's name in the byline, and sometimes they won't.  I always presumed that if no name was attached to an article, then it was written by some junior member of the media house's staff.  However, if an article was copied from another media house, then appropriate attribution was expected.

Today I offer two curious examples from T&T's daily papers' websites, both involving cricket. {Read more}

Why don't T&T media professionals check facts?

November 26, 2009 by Edmund Gall

Since leaving T&T about seven years ago, I've been relying mostly on T&T daily newspapers’ websites to keep abreast of local news.  Before leaving, I never used their websites; I preferred poring over the physical newspapers instead.  My transfer from the physical to the online versions of the news had an interesting side-effect: spotting errors is easier.

I'm not talking just about typos, or more correctly typographical errors, which include incorrect use of grammar and poor spelling.  These have been around for some time in the T&T media, I guess. Otherwise the late Undine Giuseppi wouldn't have been able to sustain her long-running English language column.  I've complained to the editors of both these dailies about this several times over the past few years, to little or no avail.  While egregious and frequent, typos can cause relatively little harm to the average reader.

No, I'm referring to the more dangerous kind: the factual errors.  These cover a range of forms.  I've observed simple ones, such as when reporters get the names of persons, organisations or events wrong.  For example, go search the websites for articles on the T&T men's cricket team's performance at the Airtel Twenty20 Champions League 2009 tournament. Several reporters kept calling it the IPL Champions League, when it was clearly not.  The IPL, or Indian Premier League, is a domestic cricket league in India and just one of the seven different leagues or countries worldwide represented at this Champions League tournament. {Read more}