Consider this paragraph:

Stone has always made stories about men for whom ordinary life is impossible by accident or by choice. As a storyteller he has long made a habit out of extreme personalities, a preoccupation that during the 1990s was matched by one of the most playfully expressive styles in American mainstream pictures.

Well, it appears in Gautaman Bhaskaran's review of the film Alexander, published Feb 11, 2005. It also appears in Manohla Dargis's review in the New York Times, published November 24, 2004. It's evident who has plagiarised from whom.

I got this information via an excellent expose by Nina from Chennai, in which she also provides many other links that reveal that Gautaman Bhaskaran has been doing this for a long, long time. (Link to Nina via email from Mridula.) Somewhat like what Nikhat Kazmi, another MSM film reviewer, had been doing when Jai Arjun Singh exposed her.

In that case, the Times of India took no action against Kazmi. In this case, one can argue that the Hindu wasn't aware of this until now. Well, let us see what they do.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Update: Ravi Ratlami has another expose here.

The abandonment of the Chennai match thanks to rain, after a strong South African win in the first one-dayer, and India's emphatic response in the second, has only served to keep this series on an even keel longer, setting up the fourth ODI at Kolkata deliciously. Whoever wins here knows they are guaranteed not to lose the series, and that brings its own pressure on both teams not to lose.
The talk in the series has been tough to read from both camps, as no clear trend has emerged, no team has seized the initiative, as was the case when India drove down Sri Lanka into submission. Graeme Smith has relentlessly talked his team up, and occasionally taken a dig at the Indians. Smith didn't reveal much about the composition of his side for the match and said that South Africa "have 15 to choose from for the game". Rahul Dravid has been understated as ever, and any statements from the Indian camp will come through bat, ball, or result in the Kolkata match.

Nothing wrong in the content or anything else, just that this is the same content available in the preview by Anand Vasu on Cricinfo.com.
The reason I remember this at all is the use of the following: Abandonment, Submission and "no clear trend has emerged..."
Ideally, I would like to hear from both parties as to who was the original author. If this indeed was a newswire story, why has Cricinfo.com attributed it to Anand Vasu? If this is his original story, why is GO92.5FM reading out stuff verbatim?
One way or another, there is something fishy... unless we don't know of a content-sharing agreement.
Can either party answer?

Update: I have e-mailed Go 92.5 FM to an e-mail ID on their site (the producer) and to the Feedback section but no reply. Ditto for Cricinfo.com.

Also posted at Scribbler On The Net.

The Indian Express has carried a "clarification" today with regard to what they had done yesterday. The clarification, which I couldn't find online, states:

Some of the comments carried yesterday were sent to us by Manjunathan's IIM batchmates. These comments were originally posted on a blog. All of today's letters come directly to The Indian Express. If you want to share your thoughts with us ... [their email id, etc]

This is a poor explanation. Firstly, the wording might make it appear that the people whose words were stolen, including me and Rashmi Bansal, were Manjunathan's batchmates, and we sent our stuff to them, both of which are untrue.

Secondly, consider this: if I send them a link that leads to an editorial in the Telegraph about Manjunathan, and they lift the content there and later claim that that it was sent to them by "Manjunathan's IIM batchmates," that explanation clearly won't hold. Well, the same copyright protection that applies to the Telegraph applies to Rashmi's blog. (For more, do read my post, "Copyright and the internet.")

In any case, one could excuse it as a mistake in good faith if an apology accompanied the clarification. No such apology does. Ethically, they owe an apology to:

a] Indian Express readers, who were lied to about the origin of this content.

b] To all the people, including Rashmi and me, whose editorial content was used without their permission, and in contravention of fair-use conventions. (Click here and go to point 4 for more.)

DNA, the Mumbai paper, gracefully issued such an apology when they were implicated in a similar case recently, and enhanced their credibility in the process. It is a shame that despite its talk of journalistic integrity, the Indian Express hasn't yet apologised for its obvious mistakes.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Consider this hypothetical example: Jerry Rao writes an Op-Ed in the Indian Express. It appears on, say, a Wednesday. It is about the License Raj. Two days later, the Times of India carries a piece about the License Raj. The strap of the piece says, "We have received an outpouring of letters from readers in India and overseas about the License Raj." It carries a selection of these 'letters.' The first of them is by Jerry Rao, and carries the first three paras of the piece he had written in IE. There is no mention of IE.

It would be a big deal, wouldn't it? IE would be justified in getting their knickers in a twist, as would Mr Rao, who sent ToI no letter at all. ToI would almost certainly carry an apology and a correction. Now, here's something I want to emphasize:

The copyright protection Rao's column in the Indian Express enjoys is exactly the same as that a post by Rashmi Bansal on Youth Curry enjoys, or a post by me on this blog.

Everything that appears on any internet site is protected by copyright, unless the author chooses to give it away. Click here for more on this. (Do read Point 4 of that to see what constitutes "fair use." ToI's use of Rao's article in my hypothetical example would not.)The practice that some Indian newspapers have adopted, of taking content freely from websites at will, ignores this truth. That needs to change.

PS: Let me stress that the above example was hypothetical. But this is not.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

The Indian Express has a massive feature, taking up two-thirds of a page in the print edition, featuring letters from people regarding the sad death of S Manjunathan. The strap on top says, "We have received an outpouring of letters from readers in India and overseas, many of them former classmates of the slain Manjunath."

The thing is, the Indian Express is lying.

These are not letters they have received, but excerpts from blogposts and comments. The first few "letters," in fact, are from a post Rashmi Bansal wrote on the subject here, and comments left on that post. That's right, they even stole the comments. In the print edition (and left off the online page, oddly), they also have a letter supposedly written by me, quoting the headline and the first line of this post, which sound rather stupid taken out of context.

IE is a newspaper I've admired for their editorial probity, and I am certain that this is just the work of some lazy sub-editor. I'd love to see what action they take against him or her. Also, they owe an apology to Rashmi, and to all the people they claimed wrote letters to them. This is out-of-character behaviour, and I hope they set the record straight.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Update: The Indian Express has changed all the content on the page I linked to. Heh. Anyone living in India can see it in the print edition, however. I shall scan it and post a jpeg if it becomes an issue.

Update 2: Do read this post of mine: Copyright and the internet.

Update 3 (November 26): The Indian Express has accepted its mistake in a strangely half-hearted way, and has not apologised. Do read my post: "Mistake? Yes, ok. Apology? No."

Update 4 (November 29): Dance With Shadows writes on this subject.

I recently received an email from a gentleman named Sach Kohli, in which he pointed out how three pieces that had appeared in the Times of India appeared remarkably similar to pieces that had appeared in Cosmopolitan. He included an email that he had sent Jaideep Bose, an editor at the ToI, bringing this to his attention. I emailed Jaideep myself to ask if there was any innocent explanation for this that I was missing. (Perhaps a content-sharing arrangement with Cosmopolitan, though the content would then surely have been attributed to them.) Two days have passed, and I have received no reply. Thus, with Sach's permission, I'm reproducing the mail he sent Jaideep, as well as the incriminating pictures.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sach Kohli <[email id snipped]>
Date: 30-Jun-2005 19:36
To: Jaideep Bose <[email id snipped]>

Dear Editor,

I wish to report a striking similarity between three articles that
appeared in Monday's and Tuesday editions of Bombay Times, and those
that appeared in the June 2005 issue of the US edition of Cosmopolitan
magazine.

Monday, June 27
BT: page 6, titled "Give yourself a Break", Gif Attachment:
BT_GiveYourselfABreak.GIF
US Cosmopolitan June Edition 2005: page 179, titled "Give Yourself a
Break", attached file COSMO_giveyourselfabreak.jpg

Tuesday, June 28
BT: page 6, titled "10 Clues He'll be Bad in Bed", GIF Attachment:
BT_10CluesHe'llBeBadInBed.GIF
US Cosmopolitan June Edition 2005: page 203, titled "10 Clues He'll be
Bad in Bed", attached file COSMO_10clueshe'llsuckinbed.jpg
and
BT: page 6, titled "Tap into his Guy Mind-set", GIF Attachment:
BT_TapIntoHisGuyMind-Set.GIF
US Cosmopolitan June Edition 2005: page 238, titled "Tap into his Guy
Mind-set", attached file COSMO_tapintohisguy.jpg

Note: the Cosmo pictures were scanned from a personal copy of the June
2005, US Edition. The Bombay Times pictures were grabbed from your
epaper (epaper.indiatimes.com) service.

Nobody has paid me to do this, nor am I doing this out of any malice.
I'm just a regular reader of the Times. However, the fact that I could
detect three cases of blatant plagiarism in your paper merely out of
buying a single copy of the June 2005 Cosmopolitan issue points to a
rot that a much deeper rot! I can understand that the Bennett
management may not care for the 'editorial integrity' of Bombay Times.
But, when in the period of two days, your esteemed paper blatantly
lifts at least three articles, with their layouts, out of a single
issue of Cosmopolitan US, with minor changes in copy [...]
it simply reeks of lazy incompetence. If this is the regular deal, I
wonder if Bennett Coleman appreciates the legal implications of this
practice??

Yours,
A regular reader, Sach

The pictures:








Read the full post

Way back in January, when the SEA-EAT blog was taking up all our (the SEA-EAT team's) time, we were coping with a lot of international media attention. International, that is, except for Indian media, who didn't seem to have a clue this was happening in their backyard. (Of course, they were busy covering the aftermath of the Tsunami, and most hadn't heard of blogs, but still.) Many of the journos we spoke to, barring the ones on a tech beat, hadn't a clue what blogs were, and we each evolved our own canned explanations; a kind of Blog 101 if you will.

Nilanjana Roy and Devangshu Datta, the friends whose hospitality and broadband connection I was abusing at that time, were, besides quietly helping me cope and pointing to sources, also evangelising the effort to their numerous media contacts. Ashok Malik called to wish them for the New Year, and DD quickly told him about tsunamihelp. Ashok spoke to me for a few minutes, asked a few searching questions (I distinctly remember the relief I felt at not having to explain what a blog was), and said someone would be in touch shortly. The Indian Express was, I think, the first Indian publication to write about SEA-EAT.

Last month, Ashok got in touch to get a little background for a talk he was to give at the Asian School of Journalism, Chennai, on blogs and what they meant for media. Here, with his permission, is the text.

---

My topic today is on blogs and, roughly, the challenges and opportunities the Internet has in store for traditional newspaper wallahs. We began yesterday on, I thought, a somewhat sombre note: with dire thoughts on where print is and still more dire thoughts on where it's headed.

I must say I offer a somewhat different perspective. I came into the profession 15 years ago, spending 10 of them as a journalist, until, at the turn of the millennium, somebody changed my name to "content provider". I've heard obituaries of print or of serious print if you prefer from, almost, the day I entered the newsroom for the first time. How valid are such fears? I would think they're exaggerated.

For a start, the invention of the Internet and the world wide web have made me more optimistic about the future of my calling, if I may use the word, than at any time since I became a journalist. Simply put, what it means is that every new print journalist doesn't inevitably have to throw his hands up at some stage and succumb to that job offer from television. He's got a fresh lease of life.

Let's not confuse the possible or even emergent longterm decline of print with the death of the written word. The first is happening; the second is not. The written format – or typewritten format – is only evolving, adapting to a new framework.

This change is visible in the way we present and consume news, views, ideas and all that is the stock-in-trade of journalism. It is changing, for instance, language, making it, depending on your point of view, more accessible or more low-brow. Yesterday, a speaker here pointed to the shortening of editorial page articles from 1,200 words to 800 words as an unfortunate example of new trends in journalism.

Frankly, I think we have to live with that evolution, live with the fact that attention spans are shorter, the Internet – where the future of the written word lies – is comfortable with concise pieces. If you can't say something in 800 words, don't pretend you could have said it in 1,200.

Again, not that is evolution in language is unique. In 1994, I remember, I moved to New Delhi and joined the Hindustan Times, Manoj Joshi's paper. Going through archival copies in the library, one day, I came across a paper from 1978 or 1979. The lead headline on the sports page read: "Miss Navratilova defeats Mrs Evert Lloyd". This was, of course, the Wimbledon final. Now if a sub-editor were to headline that story today, he would probably write: "Martina smashes Chris". The presentation and the idiom would be different; journalism ever needs new hooks to grabs its readers.

That evolution from stodgy to snappy headlines must have anguished old school journalists. It was, after all, part of a package that saw sports coverage leap from page 17 or 18 to page one, that saw a shake-up in the hierarchy of news. It made the good journalist's job that much harder. Yet did it finish him, do him out of work, lead to social catastrophe, end civilisation as we know it? Not a chance. Rest assured, neither will page 3 nor overenthusiastic stories on Sunjay and Karishma Kapoor.

Good journalism will always find a way, in newspapers and – after April 2040, if you go by Patrick Walters' sell-by date – on the Internet, on individual initiative-based newsites, and through the medium of blogs.

Why am I so sold on blogs? I find them an awfully exciting phenomenon. A blog, as everybody here knows, is a sort of personal website on which the blogger uploads pretty much anything he wants – his views, a short essay, criticism of a social phenomenon, a dialogue with his pet dog, links to articles he may have read and liked (or disliked).

Increasingly blogs are emerging as:
• alternatives or complements to newspaper editorial pages;
• news sources on anything from the intensity of disaster in a particular area to stories not deemed "sexy" enough by the mainstream media;
• community platforms and networks, just as newspapers, particularly in smaller towns, once were, before the men in suits took over.

Lest I be accused of fabricating evidence, I'll give you a few examples of Indian blogs that I visit. Amit Varma is freelance journalist who lives in Bombay , writes on cricket for cricinfo.com and on libertarianism for the Asian Wall Street Journal. He also runs indiauncut.blogspot.com , a blog that has been variously described as the "second Mrs Varma" – that description came, interestingly, from the first Mrs Varma! – and an obsessive but harmless hobby, like say, stamp collection.

indiauncut is Amit's personal opinion page, his views – eminently readable ones, I may add – on cricket, society, economics, politics. indiauncut is his way of telling his friends what he's been reading and where, if they click on the hyperlink, they could find it on the Net. indiauncut is also, when Amit can afford it or is motivated enough, his personal news bulletin. Immediately after the December 26 tsunami, Amit spent about 10 days travelling through the worst hit regions of Tamil Nadu, blogging reports where he could, when he could, writing one paragraph or a 1,000 words, as the stories came to him.

Earlier this week, I called Amit Varma. How was your tsunami experience different from a newspaper reporter's, I asked. "There was no word stipulation," he said, "I could go above 1,000 or write below 200 words. I could quote one person, and not wait to get three other quotes to 'balance' the story. I could write as I saw it. It was a step up in my evolution as a journalist."

The media birth of the tsunami was, however, a qualitatively different blog: tsunamihelp.blogspot.com had a million and a half hits in a fortnight starting December 27, acting, as an insider put it, as a "giant clearing house of information."

Put together by an ad copywriter from Mumbai – he eventually had more than 200 people helping him, all online, ranging from a Sri Lankan TV executive to a web designer from Boston and an academic in Holland – this blog put volunteers in touch with agencies, reunited families by matching posts of those missing each other, provided links to where you could turn to for information, updated its news pages with its band of volunteer or citizen reporters.

In times of disaster, the town hall in ancient Athens must have played a similar role. tsunamihelp was classic newspapering, as the Americans would put it. It defined the public sphere Robin Jeffrey so thoughtfully reminded us of yesterday.

Funnily, reversing the traditional pattern, the team behind tsunamihelp provided the template for katrinahelp.blogspot.com, after the recent New Orleans disaster. An Indian media product, if that be the word, was the prototype for an American one; katrinahelp had a million visitors in two days.

Yesterday we heard of the many negatives of globalisation, and of how it skews the proverbial world information order. I would like to believe if offers us new opportunities. katrinahelp is my shining example.

It will be argued, correctly, that blogs often amount to desktop journalism: a bunch of opinionated people sitting before their computers and inflicting their opinions on the world. I first noted the phenomenon of blogs in early 2004, while attempting to follow the debate across election year America. This past year's presidential election was, as you no doubt know, a deeply ideological battle, fought between two very different ideas of America. The country was divided as it seldom has been.

In my estimation, the blogs reflected this better and faster than the newspapers. They were written by individuals, they were by definition fiercely partisan, even prejudiced: pro-Democrat, anti-Republican, vilifying Kerry, crucifying Bush. They gave you raw public assessment, without intermediaries and gatekeepers in the form of reporters, columnists and news editors. The blogs were a great barometer of America 's wrenching debate; they were also, if you were open-minded about these things, a huge resource for journalists attempting to understand the election.

Are blogs as accountable as newspapers? Not in a formal sense, I agree. Yet, in keeping with the anarchic framework of perfect competition, the blogosphere offers its natural corrective to factual errors – in the form of instant comments, complaints on other blogs. It's a society that monitors itself.

Isn't all this so reflective of the early practitioners of journalism? That initial "magic" of newspapers, to borrow Robin Jeffrey's evocative expression, owed so much to the fact that editors and proprietors, or editor-proprietors, spoke their mind. They didn't even pretend to be unbiased.

In the 17th century, around the time Daniel Defoe was publishing his Review, the early British newspapers were pamphlets. In America , a century a bit later, Hamilton and Jefferson were patronising newspapers that routinely backed one and ridiculed the other. Turn to Satyajit Ray's Charulata. Its editor protagonist, an enlightened 19th century Bengali bhadralok, saw his newspaper as a vehicle for his world view. Tilak's Kesri and Swaraj were no different.

That crackle and excitement used to be the lifeblood of newspapers. With blogs, are we at the cusp of a brave new age?

This may sound paradoxical, but the "say it as it is" school of newspapers ran into problems when they began making money, discovered "marketshare" and carved out cities between two or three survivors. Dumbing down and moderation are, after all, two sides of the same coin. A newspaper that wants to sell to all types of people, leftwingers, rightwingers, socialists, liberals, even, to use the current bugbear term, neo-liberals, tries to alienate none. As such, it often says nothing, takes no position – but makes lots of money.

I'm told at least one blogger in America attracts advertising worth $ 10,000 a month and others have got lecture and book contracts, as indeed have some Indian bloggers. In September, yahoo.com hired former CNN journalist Kevin Sites to travel alone to conflict zones across the world for a year-long series as a SoJo – solo journalist. In essence, Sites is being paid to write a blog.

Citizen journalists, with their text blogs and video blogs, were paid by British newspapers for reports after the July London bombings

Are these flickering exceptions or do they hold a beacon to a new treasure room that journalism is at the edge of? Honestly, I don't know. Someday the MBAs who pay people like me our salaries – and who in turn are paid their salaries by people like Mr N. Ram – will finally pronounce judgment on a possible revenue model for blogs. Who knows, they may even seek to tamper with the format.

Till then log on to the blogs. You might just be onto the biggest story of the rest of our careers.

Talk at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, October 15, 2005.

© Ashok Malik.

"If you steal from us we will cut off your hands," goes the excellent headline from a Sepia Mutiny post. Abhi is upset that DNA filched content off the fine blog he writes for, and rightly so.

Let me tell you why I like Abhi's headline -- it expresses outrage. Over the months, I have seen Indian bloggers' outrage at MSM behaviour change into apathy, as we have realised that the MSM giants couldn't care less about us little flies, and that we don't yet have the kind of readership we'd need to make a difference. (By my estimate, around 7000 readers every day for Sepia Mutiny and half that much for Kiruba Shankar and India Uncut, and less for most others. Negligible, even in an Indian context, compared to the influence US bloggers wield.)

So we've sort of given up. We see plagiarism, lazy journalism and all kinds of ethical transgressions from MSM (though this is the first such I have encountered in DNA, which is otherwise a promising paper), and while we rant about it once in a while, we let it pass. It has become a fact of life for us, like corrupt politicians and extreme poverty. We block it out.

Well, maybe there is something we can do about it. That's the spirit with Peter Griffin has launched this blog. He describes it in his first post, as a "critical, yet balanced view from people who understand both sides of the story. An open forum, of the media, by the media, for the media."

Will anybody listen? Wait and see.

Cross-posted, with some changes, as that's an announcement post, on India Uncut.

Should journos who write for print publications that also have a web version get paid more for their work to appear online? That's an old debate, I know. What's your view?

And here, to seed the discussion, is the piece of news that brought the issue to mind.

Fourteen New Zealand Herald columnists (no, that one is not a relative) suddenly found themselves behind the "premium content" section of the paper's site.

They have been negotiating with APN management, initially for the columns to return to free access and subsequently for a share of the additional revenue reaped by the Herald from their work and/or new contracts in which the copyright of their work would rest with them. They have had no success in those talks and have chosen to release the statement to explain their position.

You can read the whole thing here.

Do come back and let us know what you think.

Have been thinking about the various little circles I find myself in, thanks to both my work and my interests.

First, there’s journalism, which as the cliché goes is an incestuous profession. There’s a lot of truth to that cliché. For a group of people who are expected (by the very nature of their work) to be an informed lot, sensitive to and aware about everything that’s going on in the world, it’s remarkable what a sniveling little bunch of myopic sneaks many of us really are. Many of the mid-level journos I’ve worked with spend all their free time bitching about others in the profession, trading conspiracy theories about why so-and-so left this newspaper and shifted to that magazine, and so on. (If you’ve been in the profession for at least four or five years and changed jobs even once, there will be at most two degrees of separation between you and practically any other journo in town. So there’s plenty of scope for frustration-fuelled gossip where you’re trying to impress younger colleagues with “insider knowledge” about another organisation.)

A subset is features journalism, about which the less said the better. And then there’s the literary circuit, a more bearable lot on the whole (though naturally I’m biased) – but lit-journos very easily become a part of the community they cover (through friendships with like-minded publishers, writers etc), and that leads to even more incest. More than once I’ve found myself at a get-together that includes a) a recently published writer and b) three to four people (including me) who have reviewed his/her book. On the surface it’s all very relaxed and comfortable, but I always find it a bit icky. Am probably being too conservative, but well...

And now, on top of all this there’s the blogosphere, which by comparison is a much more eclectic, dynamic group of people – except that most of the bloggers I interact with on a regular basis happen to be journos as well! So that’s what my life has become – one incestuous circle intersecting another to make a cosy little Venn diagram, and the upshot is that in the space of a single week I might easily end up meeting the same set of people (including some I’m not even very friendly with) in several different contexts. A book launch/reading. A press conference for a non-literary event. Film preview. Bloggers’ meet. A get-together at a mutual friend’s place.

People on the outside of these intersecting circles think all this must be such great fun, but those of us on the inside (even those who are a lot more social than I am) know how trying it can be. When it becomes too much for me to handle, the one surefire antidote is to catch up with old friends from my pre-journalism days - the ones who are not in any way associated with media (okay, a couple of them are in advertising), or blogging, or literature. They aren’t particularly interested in my work, most of them don’t know I blog (it would never even occur to them to Google my name) and most mercifully of all they never read – except maybe a Dan Brown or a Sidney Sheldon once in a while. It’s always a relief to meet them. Keeps me sane.

P.S. A couple of things got me started on this train of thought. First, a conversation at The Book Shop, Khan Market reminded me of how small and closed the literary circuit really is. I’d picked up The Complete New Yorker from the shop last month, and I asked the owner how the DVDs were selling. “Oh, they’re doing quite well,” he said, looking pleased, “we’ve sold three already.” Three. One of those was to me, another to Hurree Babu. And here I was thinking that everyone I knew had been rushing to The Book Shop (the first place the DVDs were available in Delhi) in droves to buy those delectable discs. It was quite an eye-opener. Now I’m wondering who that third freak could be.

The other thing is, I’m currently working on a biggish story on – you guessed it – blogging. I’m very ambivalent about such stories because they make me feel schizophrenic. On the one hand I have to be a good journalist and write a piece that will fulfill the requirements of mainstream media (explaining everything for the layperson, setting down facts and figures, etc). But on the other hand, as a dedicated blogger myself, I don’t like oversimplifying the concept for the easy consumption of readers who aren’t Net-savvy. The blogosphere is so varied and amorphous, it doesn’t feel right to define it in simplistic terms. Also, because it’s so vulnerable to being misunderstood or dismissed by those who are on the outside, I feel protective about it – which isn’t the best way to be if you’re writing an MSM story.

(Cross-posted on Jabberwock)