I don’t know Zachery Kouwe. I’ve never worked for The New York Times and the record will reflect I’ve never sought to. So I have no firsthand knowledge of how Kouwe came to be unemployed, an accused and convicted (all in the span of a couple of weeks) plagiarist. But since Kouwe doesn’t seem to know, either, and presumably he was there, I feel my take on it carries as much weight as anyone else’s.

If you read the story in the Observer, a couple of things stand out. First, Kouwe references the pace of things there. “In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct,” he told the Observer. “It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents.â€�

I have been complaining for years about the 24-hour news cycle and the era of “instant information.” There’s a breakneck pace to TV and online news these days, but more often it resembles someone flailing about on a treadmill. There’s lots of activity, but little real progress. The speed at which information must be processed and moved in order for a news organization to be the first to report something increases seemingly every day. It used to be a few hours constituted a lightning turnaround time. Now anything longer than 10 minutes can be considered slow. And once a story is reported—and this is especially true on TV—the same information gets repeated over and over and over for hours. Even online, incremental advances in a story are considered “Breaking News,” and are breathlessly related by the news readers, after the appropriately dire lead-in music and graphics presentation, or under screaming red electronic banners.

On the news consumer side, this cycle leads to a distorted perception of the importance of events. All news is breaking news.

On the reporting side, what used to be a grind to produce a couple of well reported stories a day has now become a hopeless race to produce as much information as possible. I can tell you that as a journalist, once you’ve been on that treadmill for a while—and it’s a different length of time for everyone—you reach a point where you get lazy and you stop concentrating. In order to move that much information, you have to. You simply cannot re-write press releases in original language, or verify every bit of information in a news story from another source … not and hope to feed the beast at the speed at which it must be fed.

This is not to excuse Kouwe’s plagiarism in any way. Again, I don’t know anything specific about what led to Kouwe’s mistakes. Maybe it was intentional and he’s just playing dumb. But I can see at least two plausible explanations for it. First, in the interest of time, he copied and pasted relevant passages from, for example, the Journal story into whatever word processing program he was using. Perhaps he intended to paraphrase it later, or use it verbatim and attribute it. Then perhaps he got distracted by any one of a dozen other news stories he was following and “aggregating” for the DealBook site and lost track of what was copied and pasted and what he intended to do with it. Again, not excusing, just explaining. Contrary to what many reporters seem to think, the “copy and paste” function is not a friend. I warned reporters here at HedgeWorld more than once against using it. Still, some swore by it. So far as I know, no mistakes ever got through to the site, although I did on a couple of occasions ask for re-writes and additional reporting on phrasing that had come straight out of news releases.

Second, when reporters on any beat spend a lot of time on that beat, and have to write a lot of stuff very fast, they sometimes find themselves using the lingo of the people on their beat and not even thinking about it. It’s in this way that Kouwe could have … and this is a stretch … could have ended up writing something in much the same manner as the Journal reporter without even thinking about it. Think of it as a kind reporter groupthink. In a rush, there are only a finite number of ways to phrase something that come to mind.

I don’t really buy that second one, now that I read over it. The first possibility is more likely to me.

But at the end of the day, the most important part of the Observer piece seems to be this statement by Observer writer John Koblin: “In the coming days, The Times will look inward to ask whether the pace of publishing in the blogs can be sustained given the level of editorial oversight they obviously need.”

There’s a lot of stuff on DealBook. I look at it every day and sometimes I’m amazed at the amount of stuff on there. I say that as the sole proprietor of HedgeWorld’s editorial operation, which involves a ton of aggregating these days. I read everything that goes on the site. Reuters stories that appear in the main news section get read, edited for HedgeWorld’s style and HTML coded. From time to time, I catch errors, and that’s after the Reuters reporters have carefully crafted the stories and at least two Reuters editors have reviewed them.

Back when I became the managing editor here, I used to wonder from time to time, and was occasionally asked by others, why I never wrote anything any more. The answer was simple: I had no time. I was reading copy from eight reporters every day, all day, plus aggregating outside content. As much as the bean counters three or four pay grades above me like to deny it because they can’t quantify it, journalism done right is a time consuming business. Treating it as if it’s not leads to problems.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Wednesday's Random Shots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.