Maureen Dowd + the Perils of Distributed Storytelling

Posted on | May 18, 2009 | View Comments

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd penned a column, Cheney, Master of Pain, which failed to properly attribute a paragraph of the piece to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog.

That fact is indisputable. Dowd admitted that the paragraph came from TPM and the Times corrected the column by day’s end. (I assume they did as much in the paper on Monday, although I don’t read newspapers so that is simply conjecture.) The fact that this happened isn’t surprising to me. I’ve worked written online professionally for more than a decade. I’ve spent my days scouring the writing of others, piecing together my ideas in the same way that I do with my In Real Life friends.

That’s what writers do. We converse with others about our thoughts, honing our arguments and working through parts of stories that aren’t quite clear to us yet. For those of us who live a portion of our lives online, the discussions that happen online — the searchable, adhoc, in real time discussions — are as much a part of the writing process as the editor.

The Web has expanded that conversation. The benefit I’ve had, though, is working for institutions that allow me to freely link to those conversations, to use those thoughts in my pieces as legitimate sources (not all sources are there for quotes) and generally encouraged a participation online.

The Times doesn’t. That Dowd is caught up in this controversy is shocking, but it’s certainly not surprising. There will be others, I suspect, in traditional outlets that don’t encourage such linking behavior. It’s beyond foolish to operate in a distributed era and act as though we don’t. The Times is now paying for that.

But there’s a flip-side to this. Dowd’s explanation of how her column was written is exactly in line with the type of distributed reporting that the so-called citizen journalist uses every day. Yet some of the very defenders of that way of reporting (I am a defender) immediately jumped at the opportunity to crucify Dowd for plagiarism.

That’s unfair at best and disingenuous at worst.

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Scenario:

A writer works on her piece with a small, but trusted, group of writers and confidants. She calls, emails and IMs them as she is working out the details of her argument. They provide valuable context, counter-arguments and thoughts.

They talk, in various formats, through the column. Some of these discussions are simply cut-and-pasted into her working document. They are not attributed because they never are, any more than you credit and editor in her column.

In the course of the discussion, one of the trusted sorts snags something from the blog. Having worked with this group before, the writer inserted it in her piece.

Is *that* not plausible? It certainly doesn’t excuse her – but is that a capital punishment offense? Is she disgraced? Does this rise to the same level as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass?

**

I was appalled that those who proclaim an understanding of the distributed style of writing were so quick to jump on Dowd, seemingly happy to see one of them get publicly outed as stealing from a blog.

That’s not a defense of what she did. If she did simply read the TPM, lift the paragraph with minor changes and insert that into her piece, then she has risen to the level of Blair and Glass (and one might include, on a lesser end, Michelle Delio, who wrote for me at Technology Review). If those turn out to be the facts, she should be fired immediately. There’s no place for out-and-out theft in a business built on trust.

However, we know that readers trust online publications that both draw ideas from many places and then link to those places. In the marketplace of ideas, there will be remixing. With remixing, we will stumble through attribution problems (exacerbated by the Times linking policy, or lack thereof) like these.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes about The Economist’s remixing of his work and the conflicted relationship between bloggers (I think that is not a term I would use as a catch-all for distributing writing) and the traditional media.

**

Dowd’s fate is not up to me and frankly I am not incline to bother opining. (Some of my digital brethren seem absolutely positive that they know best in this, despite a dearth of information. Don’t let a good reality get in the way of a loud opinion).

What we can learn is simply this: even those who support the use of the distributed storytelling model are inclined to distrust others who do it. Dowd has not received the benefit of the doubt on this despite her explanation, while weak, which suggests plausible roots.

In other words, the Times will have to wait to find all the facts and then make a judgment about what happened. We will then reserve our judgment about the newspaper.

The biggest issues are these: in a data stream of information, like the one Licklider described nearly 50 years ago at the dawn of the Internet age, how do we attribute ideas and thoughts. How do we link the abstract idea that sparks clarity on our part? How do we create a trusting, symbiotic relationship in a media ecosystem?

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