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On the Internet, nobody knows you're a made-up CTO

On Sunday InfoWorld announced it was severing ties with a contributor, Randall C. Kennedy, and removing Kennedy's blog from its site, since it discovered that Kennedy "had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software," which produced Windows security software that InfoWorld distributed.

InfoWorld competitor ZDNet had been invesigating Kennedy/Barth on its own and concluded that there were more problems with Kennedy and his company beyond the "fictional sidekick." More from Gregg Keizer at ComputerWorld and Charles Arthur at the Guardian.

Kennedy responded in ZDNet's comments, saying that InfoWorld publisher IDG knew about his ruse, and defending the integrity of his company's data about Windows security.

NYT blogs for pay?

Much chatter about Felix Salmon's Friday report from the PaidContent 2010 conference that "The NYT’s blogs are set to be paywalled" -- though "metered" might be a better verb here:

@dangillmor I can't believe the NYT would be foolish enough to paywall its blogs.

@mathewi I think that's pretty dumb, @katecollinsnyc -- blogs should be part of what helps build engagement with readers so they will want to pay
 
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#NYTPlagiarism, day-two stories

Kelly McBride, "Why Plagiarism Continues & What Writers, Editors Can Do About It":

You confront the writer with the evidence and see what he or she says. Then you suspend him pending a deeper investigation. Then you randomly go back and check his work. But before you do that, you tell him that you're going to do a check and ask if you're likely to find anything else. Of course he will tell you, "no." But nine times out of 10, you're going to find something. It's not hard. You just drop distinctive phrases from their copy into Google. Then compare the publication dates and time stamps.

Jack Shafer, The Plagiarist's Dirty Dozen Excuses:

The plagiarist attempts, as Clark puts it, "to soften the charge against them by misdirecting your attention and by muddying the core issues." These evasions allow the plagiarist to displace the key question of whether his copy was adequately sourced with the more delectable conversation about the plagiarist's mental state, his sloppy work practices, the unintended effects of modern technology, and the "meaning" of originality.

Now and again the busted plagiarist will claim "complete responsibility" for his act—but what that really means is that he wants everybody to leave him alone. Which everybody usually does.

Steve Buttry, "I lifted (but attributed) most of this post on plagiarism":

Attribution is the difference between research and plagiarism. As I blogged more than three years ago (why do we keep addressing this topic so frequently in journalism?), I wondered whether that distinction was original with me, so I Googled the phrase. I had used it before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere else on the web. So I was pretty sure I was recycling my own observation
 
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Times has a Kouwe over plagiarism

It wasn't hard to predict that New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe was on his way out the door after he was caught plagiarizing from the Wall Street Journal and other outlets.

In the New York Observer, John Koblin reports Kouwe's explanation, but folks aren't buying it:

@stevebuttry Every plagiarist says it was accidental. RT @suebb Stupidity no excuse for plagiarism RT @Poynter: Kouwe resigns from NYT http://is.gd/8zHiO

@bobbymacReuters Kouwe's explanation feels arrogant to wire reporters who work hard for what Kouwe considers minor news that he then apparently stole for NYT

More interesting than Kouwe's own tale was the way the Times chose to cover the story.

@bobbymacReuters New York Times article of its own Kouwe plagiarism problem has no byline, cites anonymous sources. http://nyti.ms/bHo7hv

@davidfolkenflik Writhe-inducing NYT head: "Times Business Reporter Accused of Plagiarism Is Said to Resign." Is said = no comment to reporters or readers.

The likelihood that the Times chose these methods on legal advice or to satisfy union rules doesn't make the paper look any less awkward.

Denton to editor: Good job. You're fired!

Yesterday we recommended Zach Seward's take on why Gawker founder Nick Denton fired his popular and successful editor, Gabriel Snyder. Felix Salmon recommends Molly Fischer's explanation:

But the Cityfile acquisition made the news seem bigger, as though Mr. Denton’s plans for world domination were entering a dramatic new phase. This wasn’t just employment shuffles and stressed-out staffers. This was about the identity of Gawker itself. Mr. Denton wrote in his announcement memo that Cityfile would serve as “the New York and media industry channel on Gawker.” Which sounds a lot like “the Gawker on Gawker.”

So if Cityfile becomes Gawker, what does Gawker become?

But it is David Carr's take that wins an approving nod from its subject, Nick Denton:

@nicknotned Damn, @carr2n always gets way closer to the truth than anybody else. http://nyti.ms/blTBWW

Carr writes:

We learned that Mr. Denton wants Gawker to be a large, sturdy platform capable of playing among giants; that he will do whatever he thinks he needs to do to make that happen, including canning a loyal, successful employee; and that even if you crack the code on traffic, you can get run over anyway.

Other links of note

• To go with yesterday's Gawker post calling for "A Moratorium on Cranky Old Writers Complaining About the Internet," go read Vaughan Bell's Slate essay on the long, repetitious history of communications-technology scares.

• Esquire's moving portrait of Roger Ebert -- blogging heroically in the face of awful illness -- is a must-read.

• Eric Boehlert deconstructs James O'Keefe and the myth of the ACORN pimp.

• Google open-sources its Living Stories format, hoping news sites will adopt it.

If Gawker is right in its report that New York Times execs are arguing over whether to charge $10 or $30 a month for access to it on the new Apple iPad, a lot of people want to tell those execs how wrong they are:

@michelleminkoff @brianboyer @palewire @schwanksta Finding it hard to believe $30 was actually floated out loud. Tangible proof of a lack of understanding

@brianboyer @michelleminkoff Yes. Totally screwy. Value-based pricing gone awry. I pay that much for print because they send trucks to my house.

@seamuscondron @mediatwit I think the low end of $10 per month is borderline insane. The app will have to really bring it for me to pay that.

@chanders @mathewi if even a fraction of that NYT "print war" story is true it displays a level of ignorance on the print side that is shocking.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

I love the New York Times, and the iPad app demo they gave last month looked great, but $360 a year is insane. It’s a simple choice between playing for the (digital) future and temporarily propping up the (print) past.
 
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The future's so bright...

Columbia professor Michael Schudson's speech at the USC/Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism presenting a "quasi-utopian vision of journalism's future" was widely and enthusiastically retweeted over the past day. Here's a digest of the full speech:

(1) Most past journalism "did not set the bar very high."

(2) American journalism hit a "golden age" for a generation beginning in the 1970s -- but even then most papers did little "serious accountability journalism."

(3) "The emerging information ecology can and very likely will produce a better journalistic environment than we have seen before," for six reasons:

• New online outfits don't have to spend on presses, paper, trucks
• Today journalists can produce more thanks to digital tools
• There's a new ethic of sharing online
• Theres' lots more data available
• "Obsessive, endless, gritty enthusiasm" fuels new online ventures
• "There are non-market ways to assure the survival of worthwhile practices that the marketplace itself can no longer protect."

(4) "I’m placing my bets on low-profit and non-profit journalism, on collaborative journalism, most of it but not all of it online....Some of [the] great redwoods will fall, some of them will survive. But pay attention to the saplings far below them that are replenishing the soil in ways that will transform the informational forest in ways that may make it more nourishing for us all."
 
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