No Poaching!   

News organizations tend to be outraged when other outlets follow up their investigations and fail to acknowledge groundbreaking work. But is there anything wrong with chasing a good story?

COPYING WORDS is one thing.
It's a journalistic no-no, one that can even get you fired.
But story ideas? Now that's a different scenario altogether. See a good one? Do your own version. It's a common practice, even encouraged. And why not? If a story plays in Peoria, why not in Portland, or for a national audience?
But what happens if you not only borrow the idea, but also quote many of the same people? Appropriate the same structure? Use the same anecdotes? Follow in the footsteps of groundbreaking reporting without citing it? When does borrowing become something more, something that motivates reporters and editors to complain?
Some call it story poaching. Others call it plagiarism. Talk to the accusers, and they often say they're ignored. Talk to the accused, and they often bristle at either of the "p" words. Poaching? That's nonsense. Plagiarism? There's no copyright on good ideas, or interview subjects, as long as you do your own work.
Yet clearly there are reporters and editors who feel aggrieved at the hands of other news organizations. A line was crossed, they say, from simply borrowing a good idea. Does that line exist, and if it does, what should be done when news organizations step across it?

WHEN TERRELL PETERSON'S sorrowful face made the cover of Time magazine in November, it wasn't his first brush with the media. The 5-year-old, who had died from long-term abuse while living with relatives, had become the poster child for problems with Georgia's child welfare system.
More than a year earlier, Peterson's harrowing tale had appeared in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution series by reporter Jane Hansen, who has covered child welfare issues for more than a decade. To find his story, the paper battled state authorities for about a year to open files documenting the cases of dead children. For another seven months, Hansen pored over box after box of records in a windowless room on the 21st floor of a government office building, thoroughly examining more than 200 of the 844 cases and looking at another 300.
After her articles on the issue ran in late 1999 and early 2000, Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes proposed legislation in the winter of 2000 allowing easier access to the records, among other reforms. He also praised Hansen for her work. "Jane did a lot to spark a lot of the changes that have taken place," says DeAlvah Simms, Georgia's child advocate. "She's definitely had an impact on the system."
Time's subsequent cover story looks at problems with the system nationwide and focuses on several states. The section about Georgia features some of the many children Hansen had written about, including Peterson. It says that the files on those cases were "obtained by Time." There is no mention of the Journal-Constitution or changes in the law that made the files open to everyone.
Hansen doesn't want to comment about how she felt after looking at the newsweekly's story. But her editor on the project, Thomas Oliver, will. If it hadn't been for Hansen's work, Oliver says, Time would never have known about Terrell Peterson or had access to the files. All he wanted was a simple credit, and he complained to the magazine in writing.
"I don't understand what is so difficult about acknowledging another colleague's work," says Oliver, now an editorial writer for the Atlanta Journal. "You don't have to put it in a headline or run their picture or nominate them for Good Samaritan or anything.
"The industry standard is to rip off...and I don't get it. I don't understand why we treat one another this way."
Executive Editor John Walter says he was particularly disturbed when the magazine used the wording, "The files, obtained by Time."
"While that's literally true, we all know what the word implied‹that this organization has done something no one else can do," says Walter. "Not only was that not true, it was the year of Jane's work that made those files available, so they could be obtained by Time."
Timothy Roche, who wrote the Time article, says he's confused by the Journal-Constitution's complaints and disappointed that the paper thinks only it can write about the issue. "I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that project," says Roche, the magazine's southern bureau chief. "I guess I'm a little saddened, and a little insulted, but I don't know if I should be."
Roche, who says he has written about foster care issues since 1989, says he started working on his story in 1998, before the Journal-Constitution articles appeared. Debra Richman, deputy director of public affairs for Time, says the magazine's purpose "was to spotlight a system in crisis nationally," using Georgia as one example of the 20 states reviewed.
The majority of the reporting was done in early 2000, Roche says. That was before the open-records change in the law went into effect, and Roche says he had to conduct his own fight with state authorities for the records he used.
When he received the files on 13 cases that were under state investigation, he went through them page by page. "Jane Hansen didn't do that for me," Roche says. He adds that, "A lot of our material came not just from the files but other reporting." He chose the same children because they represented a cross section of cases, he says. Because Hansen had written about so many children, Roche says, overlap was inevitable.
As for giving the Journal-Constitution credit, Roche says space was already at a premium. "Would I give two sentences to Jane Hansen and the AJC for something they should be doing as responsible journalists? Or something that would show a public misdeed?"

ACADEMIA HAS A SIMPLE way of getting around this problem of giving credit; it's called the footnote, says Deni Elliott, director of the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana. But there's no tradition of using footnotes in journalism. Whether or not it would be practical or possible to do so, the problem isn't merely technical. Acknowledging someone else's work goes against an unwritten macho journalistic creed. You're supposed to be first with information. Failing that, at least you have to confirm it yourself. Giving credit to someone else is tantamount to admitting that you weren't good enough to get it on your own.
Walter of the Journal-Constitution sees that struggle in his newsroom when the paper is put in the position of chasing a story. Editors and reporters make decisions on attributing information to other news organizations on a case-by-case basis, he says, and they sometimes hear from competitors who believe they've been given short shrift. "I think some journalists do hold off [giving credit], thinking it's better not to mention it," Walter says, adding, "I don't feel that way at all."
Crediting someone else's previous work on a story, if significant, should be a regular practice, says Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman at the Freedom Forum. While he sees no problem with news organizations picking up on stories broken elsewhere, he says they need to be careful in cases where they get major inspiration.
"When that groundwork is not acknowledged, or has been obscured, or is borrowed outright, then a serious ethical line has been crossed," McMasters says. "There is absolutely no shame in acknowledging contributions of earlier reporting, and there is shame in not giving credit where credit is due." That is true, he says, even if a news organization was already working on its investigation when another one published or broadcast its findings first. It makes the story more complete, he says, and removes "any concerns about unpleasant parallels."
McMasters says a similar type of situation can occur when television producers call up reporters or analysts to tap their expertise on a story, but fail to give them credit. Newsday editors say that's what happened to them at the hands of ABC's newsmagazine "20/20."

"GOOD EVENING," said anchor Jack Ford on the November 29, 1999, edition of "20/20." "Tonight, we bring you the explosive results of a major investigation. Because of what Œ20/20' has discovered, a 33-year-old murder case is now being reopened. It was one cold-blooded killing among many that happened, during one of this country's most darkest chapters, when bigotry bred violence and the law looked the other way."
Newsday Editor Tony Marro didn't like what he heard. Similar results of the "six-month investigation" that "20/20" was touting had been published nearly a year earlier by Newsday reporter Stephanie Saul. In fact, Saul had talked to people involved in the show, providing them with information and directing them to sources that had not been easy to find, Marro says.
Saul's report, published in December 1998 and called "Their Killers Walk Free," looked at several unsolved murders of black men and featured interviews with suspected killers. It took her more than a year and more than a dozen trips to the South, says her editor on the project, National Editor Lonnie Isabel.
The cases "20/20" highlighted were also in Saul's stories. The segment had interviews with some of the same suspected killers. In promoting one of them, an interview with Charles Marcus Edwards, it said Connie Chung would be "face to face with a suspected killer. For the first time in 45 years, he talks about a senseless and brutal crime." Technically, it wasn't the first time. Saul had previously quoted Edwards for a December 16, 1998, article. It contained only one direct quote from Edwards about the killing; it also talked about his present life and included a photo taken at the same time. The "20/20" interview was a bit longer. Later in the broadcast, before Chung interviewed another suspected killer, Ernest Avants, she said, "Our investigation led us to a trailer home parked in the woods in the tiny Mississippi town of Bogue Chitto." Again, Saul had previously found Avants in his trailer, and that story was also published the previous December.
When Newsday editors complained, the tiff led to a "nasty exchange of correspondence," and "20/20" didn't acknowledge the paper's work, Marro says. "If you take a look at the series that she did and take a look at the transcript of what '20/20' did, structurally, she basically drew them a road map." Saul says while she had no problem with "20/20" doing the story, "I felt the piece was parallel...similar enough that they should have somehow credited Newsday."
The "20/20" segment drew a "dart" from Columbia Journalism Review last year. But its producer, Harry Phillips, calls the claims by Newsday "bogus, completely bogus. We launched a major investigation and put together a team, and the results speak for themselves."
Phillips says he read Saul's stories, along with many other articles, including some by Jerry Mitchell of Jackson, Mississippi's Clarion-Ledger, and several books. "What am I supposed to do, put a bibliography at the end of a program that says I read this and that? I don't think so," Phillips says. The ABC News producer says he did talk to Saul and asked her to work with the show for pay, but the discussions ended after she demanded $20,000 for two weeks' work. "She provided me with nothing that I didn't already have or find myself independently," Phillips says.
Saul says while the figures are in dispute, she did ask for more money than "20/20" offered because she would have had to take a leave of absence from her Newsday job to help the show for several weeks. The money "20/20" offered wouldn't fairly compensate her, she says. "There was no reason for me to take off to lead Connie Chung around Mississippi for that amount of money," Saul says.
Phillips points out that his show's findings advanced the story: It made a discovery that led investigators to reopen one of the cases. Newsday acknowledged that fact in its follow-up stories, and U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott sent a letter of commendation to "20/20." "Our report actually broke news and caused a public reaction," Phillips says. He says the newsmagazine also unearthed documents that Saul did not have. The "20/20" piece, for instance, quoted from a confession from one of the suspected killers, included in a trial transcript.
Of the fact that "20/20" looked at the same cases, he says many others had reported on the same unsolved murders, as well. "Does she own those cases?" he asks. As for the claim of the exclusive interview with Charles Marcus Edwards, Phillips says that was his understanding from Edwards. And just as Saul did, "20/20" had to find people like Edwards and Avants on its own. "As a journalist, I fail to see that anyone owns a story they report on," Phillips says. "I'm very proud of our work."

FORMER ABC NEWS executive Av Westin says television's reputation for lifting stories is well-deserved. Westin, who was executive producer of "20/20" and vice president for program development at ABC News from 1980 to 1989, says he was careful to give credit when it was due. "But it did happen and probably still does, that the correspondent or reporter has advanced the piece, and [thinks] it's a new story. These guys should all err on the side of giving credit."
He says that should have been the case in the Newsday example, even if "20/20" did much of its own work. "It wouldn't have hurt, and it wouldn't have diminished the status of the work he did," says Westin. "What would have been wrong with that?"
Television--and newsmagazines in particular--are a favorite target of journalists' wrath when it comes to story poaching:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which did a series called "Nine Minutes, 20 seconds," about a commuter plane crash, accused "20/20" of plagiarism when it did a piece in 1999 that mimicked the structure and used some similar phrasing, says editorial writer Oliver. Although the show did cite the paper during its rolling credits at the end of the broadcast, Oliver says it deserved something more substantial, given the similarity of the two pieces. ABC spokeswoman Alyssa Apple wrote in an e-mail that the show also provided a link to the Journal-Constitution series on its Web site.
Sports Illustrated complained to "Dateline NBC" after it followed a 1999 story in the magazine on pedophiles who become Little League coaches, says public relations director Joe Assad. The segment featured many of the same people quoted in the magazine story. Hilary Smith, senior manager of NBC News communications, says while the magazine published a great piece and gave the newsmagazine the idea, the show did its own reporting and had to track down molestation victims, since they were not named. "Certainly the idea was similar but not something that originated with Sports Illustrated," says Smith. "There would be no need to give them credit for something like this."
The Kansas City Star protested to ABC after "PrimeTime Live" did a segment on meat inspections without citing similar work that appeared in the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning series. Now a Knight Ridder paper, the Star and the network then shared owner Capital Cities/ABC. "In some ways we were happy because it got wider play," says projects reporter Mike McGraw, who wrote the series with Jeff Taylor in 1991. "But in some ways, it was annoying." Sam Donaldson did mention the Star in the next week's broadcast. Apple wrote that PrimeTime's version was "a completely separate story as we conducted our own undercover investigation and reported a firsthand account."
McGraw, a past board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, was approached about organizing a panel discussion on the topic of story poaching at last year's IRE national conference, but says he dropped the idea after some broadcast members became upset with the implication that television was being targeted. "It's a very touchy subject," McGraw says.
Certainly, the complaints aren't just directed at television. The target is just as often the "big boys" of the national print media, who swoop in and redo versions of local stories. And the accusations have been swirling for a long time. In 1992, for instance, Army Times accused Newsday of lifting material in its Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about the Persian Gulf War. National Journal complained in 1988 that the Philadelphia Inquirer had purloined material for its Pulitzer-winner on a secret Pentagon budget. The charges were denied, and the prizes not affected.

WHILE INVESTIGATIVE pieces are often at the center of accusations of journalistic theft, protests sometimes crop up in connection to breaking or spot news. Sometimes it involves the use of Associated Press material or other wire copy, where the rules for attribution can get fuzzier.
Reporter Thomas "Dennie" Williams of the Hartford Courant was pleased late last year to get an interview with 95-year-old Corinne Tilden, a descendant of Samuel Tilden (a contender caught in the other presidential recount). Although the story was just a spot news-related feature, it hadn't been easy tracking her down. The day after the piece ran in November, Williams picked up a copy of the New York Post and was surprised to see quotes from his interview. Only it wasn't under his name--it carried the byline of William Neuman.
"I'm like, 'Wow, check this out,' " says Williams. "There's all my quotes, they're identical to my story. I was outraged." He made his feelings known to the Post and on Jim Romenesko's MediaNews Web site.
Post reporter Neuman gives this account: Williams' story was picked up by the AP, which distributed it without citing the Courant or Williams as its source. Neuman then rewrote it under his byline. He did no original reporting, he says, and gave no credit to AP. "They asked me to rewrite it, and that's what I did," says Neuman. He says that's "pretty standard" practice in New York.
In fact, AP's local members are allowed to use local copy as they wish, says AP spokesman Jack Stokes. How they do that varies from newspaper to newspaper.
Steve Geimann, former chair of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee, says reporters should give credit for information they didn't come by on their own, including wire copy. "I think it's misleading to the reader," says Geimann, media/telecom editor at Bloomberg News in Washington, D.C. "I'm a purist when it comes to telling people what I know and how I know it."
In a reverse of that situation, U.S. News & World Report Senior Editor Dana Hawkins accused an AP reporter of poaching a story she broke last summer. Hawkins had reported that Mattel planned to place a program on its Web site that would allow consumers to remove "spyware" from children's CD-ROMs. Spyware is a type of technology that can transmit information from a user's hard drive. Hawkins says the magazine sent out a press release about the story to AP on Friday in advance of its Monday publication, as other magazines do.
Later that evening, the story appeared on AP online and on the wire with no credit to Hawkins. It was picked up by other news organizations over the weekend, rendering Hawkins' scoop old news by Monday. "This was ridiculous; it was way out of bounds," says Hawkins. "You send out press releases in advance of stories not so people can steal it, but so they have the information."
But AP spokesman Stokes says reporter D. Ian Hopper had been working on the story himself and didn't see the magazine's press release until after his piece moved at about 6:40 p.m. that Friday on the AP wire. "This was a story that he was already following," Stokes says, pointing out that Hopper had written about spyware in an earlier story. "He already knew about this. He made no mention of the U.S. News & World Report because he sourced the story." Stokes points out that Hopper's story had more information about how the Web tool would work than Hawkins.'
Susan Kramer, a spokeswoman for Mattel at the time, says Hopper called her to talk about the story the evening the press release was distributed. Hopper did not return calls seeking comment.

WHEN ACCUSATIONS FLY about story lifting, it's no surprise that everyone gets a bit out of sorts. Most reporters believe it's a compliment when another news organization gets inspiration from their story. Yet at the same time, they don't want to feel like someone has purloined their hard work. To complicate matters, most reporters and editors have a hard time defining exactly when a colleague's work has crossed the invisible line from savvy information gathering to journalistic theft. "We know it when we see it," they say.
As the allegations echo, the people that can get lost are the readers. Jill Geisler of the Poynter Institute says keeping the readers in mind should help journalists decide when they have to attribute information. In the case of breaking news, for instance, if reporters can't verify information on their own, they have an "obligation to cite their source on behalf of the readers or viewers," says Geisler, head of Poynter's Leadership and Management Group. She spent 20 years as a TV news director.
When it comes to following up on a story idea--something that can't be copyrighted--Geisler worries that some reporters who speak up are motivated by the wrong reasons. "If someone has stolen an original idea and misappropriated your work, complain," she says. "If someone has expanded on your efforts, be happy that the citizens are well served.
"If you're going to make an accusation, it'd better be about plagiarism and not to see a bigger byline," she says.
In those cases in which a news organization does do something significant or groundbreaking, or invests a lot of time in a project, then it should be given mention when others follow up, she says. On a recent "20/20" segment about priests with AIDS, for instance, the show gave credit to the Kansas City Star and featured reporter Judy Thomas on- air talking about her findings. The paper had been investigating the story for four years, examining death certificates and church documents and conducting its own survey.
The Star agreed to act as a source for the show if it received an acknowledgment, says Metro Editor Randall Smith. "Interviewing her for the story helped bolster the interviews and reporting we conducted," wrote "20/20" spokeswoman Apple. "She clearly deserved credit for her reporting."
"In the end, it's still about the story," says Geisler. "It's not about the storyteller, unless the storyteller has performed a unique service and should be credited for that service. The reason we're citing sources is to fully inform readers and viewers of our methodology. It is second to praise the work of other journalists."