Robert Hernandez, an assistant professor at USC’s Annenberg School and writer for the Online Journalism Review caused a stir at the recent ONA conference when he asked the CEO of AOL “Is Patch evil?” As a follow up, Hernandez interviewed AOL Editor-in-Chief Brian Farnham.
By the time I saw the article and interview the comments section was closed. I wrote directly to Hernandez to express what I would have liked to have said in a comment below the article. Last night he wrote to say that OJR had re-opened the comment section briefly so they could add my email as a comment. If you appreciate having a site like Talk of the Sound in your community, you should care what the people from AOL Patch have to say because they are dumping tens of millions of dollars in an effort, in part, to swamp truly local independent sites like this one. If you like McDonald’s you will love Patch; if you like A.J.’s Burgers and Greasy Nicks you will appreciate the value of local ownership and operation like Talk of the Sound.
I would strongly encourage interested readers to go back and read the entire interview and all of the comments.
I was responding to this exchange during the interview:
In terms of quality, the other negative criticism has been in the quality of journalism… which is subjective… but the concerns and allegations about plagiarism are valid… at least in two cases, [correct]? How do you address those concerns? Perhaps not failed Patches, but those are some significant issues, [are they not]?
Absolutely — for any self-respecting journalism operation, plagiarism a serious concern. But we are really not alone in hiring human beings who make mistakes, which is often where a lot of instances of plagiarism happen, especially online. I’m not excusing the incidents you cite, but in one case the plagiarism was in copying a photo-collaged image of public-domain police mugshots without crediting the blogger who made the collage. Again — flat-out wrong, no excuses. But the editor was working hard and going too fast and got sloppy. In the other incident, the plagiarism was by a freelancer, not a full-time editor. When we found out about it, we immediately apologized, corrected the record, and ended our relationship with the freelancer. That’s about as much as anyone can be expected to do: what really matters to me is how we respond to any mistakes we make, and what we do from that point forward to learn from the mistakes and try not to repeat them. Following the incidents, we created a new online training module about issues of plagiarism and we’re making it a requirement for all editors, old and new, to take the module. That’s rolling out within a couple of weeks.
One final note on the allegations of plagiarism: we’ve been plagiarized ourselves. I’m not throwing that out there as an “everyone does it” thing, I’m more making the point that there is a lot of this kind of thing happening on the Web, but we’ve been called out I think because we’re a convenient target. Have to add once more: there’s no excuse for plagiarism and we shouldn’t do it!
Do you want to elaborate on the plagiarism or just let your statement stand?
Yeah, I won’t elaborate because I don’t want to make too big a deal about it. Stuff happens and you deal with it, on both ends of the issue.
I responded here (excuse the typo in there — that will teach me to respond via my iPhone)
From Robert Cox on December 1, 2010 at 8:13 AM
[Editor’s note: We reopened the comments on this post to get in this one.]
Mr. Hernandez,I read your interview with Mr. Farnham with great interest.
To provide some balance, the issue with Talk of the Sound was not simply that the editor of AOL Patch New Rochelle lifted content from my site without attribution. If it were, the matter could have been resolved quite simply by either removing the content or crediting me.
In point of fact AOL issued two OFFICIAL statements accusing me of lying and make various other defamatory remarks about me and my motivation for “lying” about the content in question. This went on for four days.
Neither the local editor or the regional editor (the source of the defamatory comments) ever contacted me and still have not to do this say (the local editor was fired; the regional editor is still there).
Four days after I made AOL Patch aware of the problem, Brian Farnham called me and admitted that the material had been lifted from my site.
I appreciated his calling and his admitting to me that they had plagiarized my content. He sent me an email apologizing and invited me to publish it on my site.
AOL Patch never published any sort of editor’s note, correction, or made attribution or made any other effort to acknowledge on their own site that they had (a) plagiarized; (b) lied about it repeatedly; (c) made accusatory, defamatory remarks about me in attempt to “discredit” my claims nor have they have ever retracted the defamatory claims or apologized for them.
I would prefer to consider the matter closed but if anyone at AOL Patch is going to try and pass the incident off as a matter of merely lifting an image from my site then I am going to respond.
I am sorry to see that comments were disabled on your article as I would have liked to have had the opportunity to weigh in on Mr. Farnham’s remarks regarding their Talk of the Sound incident.
There is also a second issue I discussed with Mr. Farnham which was the attempt to co-opt the site by the local Democratic Party establishment; from what I can see he had made good on his promise to make sure the site was not controlled by any local political machine.
Sincerely,
Robert Cox
Managing Editor
New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound
http://www.newrochelletalk.com
From Mr. Farnham’s perspective in his remarks are no surprise. New Rochelle is like an ant on an anthill in Africa to a guy like him who is trying to manage 500 brand new web sites (with more on the way). As the “ant”, my perspective is very different. As you, the reader are another ant and we all live in the New Rochelle “anthill”, how do you feel about it? More to the point, which do you think better serves the community — a site like AOL Patch with all of the resources and funds available to their local sites or sites like Talk of the Sound, The Loop (Larchmont/MMK), Yonkers Tribune and other grassroots, local-local community news sites?
As the owner and publisher of Talk of the Sound we don’t get to vote. No one has a “right” or a “claim” on local news coverage. Patch and their “chain/franchise”-type of competitors (Main Street News, Examiner and other “content mills) have just as much right to set up shop in New Rochelle as anyone else. What we get to do is compete for your attention. In the long-run, New Rochelle will best be served by more people being more engaged in what goes in City Hall and on the streets and byways of our City. So, while it may not be in my personal interest as publisher to have competition, you the reader are better served and, truth be told, it makes me work harder for you.
This is true just so long as deep-pocketed operations like Patch try to co-exist with the “local indies” and not crush them. Having worked in this space for almost ten years — and have had various interactions with the folks behind Backfence.com, TBD.com, GrowthSpur, Examiner.com, the “NOW” sites like Westport NOW and many others — I do not believe that a top-down approach will deliver enough revenue let alone profit to satisfy the corporate paymasters behind these efforts so that the plug will be pulled on many of these efforts. The concern is that outfits like Patch will destroy truly-local operations by suffocating them for the next 2-3 years (taking away ad dollars and otherwise elbowing them aside) then fall by the wayside themselves leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. This has already happened once to many towns, villages and small cities, including New Rochelle, when Wall Street backed “roll up” plays like Gannett in our area — rather than dozens of local papers we ended up with one regional paper that is more focused on generating revenue as the “official” paper for the regions governments than putting resources against reporting on the communities they purport to serve. Sites like Talk of the Sound, The Loop and Yonkers Tribune were a response to the vacuum created by Gannett. The concern is that we will be going through that again in 5 years but people like Bob Cox, Polly Kreisman and Hezi Ariz won’t be there to pick up the pieces.