Jim Romenesko called out Omaha World-Herald publisher Terry Kroeger for striking similarities between Kroeger’s Sunday column and one from the Kansas City Star publisher late last month.
Are publishers so overwhelmed they’re unable to write original columns?
From World-Herald publisher Terry Kroeger’s Dec. 7 column:
“To be sure, this year has been difficult for newspapers, including your World-Herald. The economic downturn has reduced our advertising revenue, which has forced us to adjust our expenses, including reducing our work force by 51 employees last month.”From Kansas City Star publisher’s Mark Zieman’s November 29 column:
“To be sure, this year has been particularly difficult for newspapers, including your hometown Star. The deep and widening recession has significantly reduced our advertising revenue, which has forced us to slash expenses and lay off valued employees.”
Two bits of information make this especially ironic:
• Kroeger’s parroting came in a column trumpeting his paper’s value as a source for unique content.
• And as a friend pointed out, Kroeger’s column, which spoke of the World-Herald’s desire to be Omaha’s news source of the future (“a newsy newspaper for busy people”), appears opposite a staff editorial entitled “Our old, ever-changing friend” — a nostalgic look at rotary-dial telephones.
UPDATE!! Kroeger responded to Romenesko. In a nutshell: “I had permission,” though I wonder if Mark Zieman knew Kroeger was going to use his exact words and sentence structure when he asked to use his “ideas.”
As one of the visitors commented, “If you’ve got such a proud history, and if you’re so bullish on your future, I’d hope you could write 1,000 — original — words telling us so.”
Wow. If you read the two columns in question, you’ll see that this is not just the lifting of a few lines. The whole column is plagiarized right down to the overall structure. This plagiarism is blatant and extensive. Kroeger either needs to step down or be fired for this.
For those of you who haven’t seen the full columns, you can finks to both within the original Romenesko post or you can click below:
Kroeger’s column
Zieman’s column
You can already tell something’s up when you read the ledes:
Zieman: “When William Rockhill Nelson founded The Star in 1880, it was instantly mocked by larger, more profitable and well-established competitors.”
Kroeger: “When Gilbert M. Hitchcock started The Omaha Daily World in 1885, he found himself in a war with multiple newspapers, all advancing ideas supporting their particular causes.”
So WHY haven’t I seen a single apology/retraction from the OWH about this?
Why haven’t I seen any other news organization report on it (or at least the LJS or DN)?
What’s the standard punishment if an actual journalist does something like this? and why hasn’t it been levied against Kroeger?
What does it say about the outdated mindset at the OWH that the publisher thought–in the age of the internet and higher accountability– that he could get away with outright plagiarism of another widely (heh) read paper’s content?
The Reader had a short piece on it this week, although the one original paragraph contained two typos and the rest was copied and pasted from the Romenesko blog. As far as critiques on journalistic credibility go, it wasn’t exactly a home run, but the mess at least got some attention.