Poynter Pointers

Well. It's the last reading blog of the semester. I know I normally do the political post first and then the reading one, but this week the election entry will require a little bit more work, and just a bit more time. Anyway...

This week I read up on "The Big P" -or plagiarism- and checking up on sources and facts. An example of the plagiarism controversy in journalism was provided by the Poynter Institute, in which they described the actions or Mr. John Merrill. Merrill had been working for the Colombia Missourian, and allegedly "borrowed" uncredited quotes from an article in The Maneater, a student paper based out of the University of Missouri. While Merrill has argued time and time again that his use of public domain facts is legal and at worst a "unintentional technical error," the case was reviewed and his editor pulled his column after decades of employment. While it's sad to see such a decorated journalist be erased by one bad instance, it goes to show the rest of us the high standards of the writing industry that we are part of in some way, shape or form. As the Poynter article said, if the lessons on being ethical and sound are in our college journalism textbooks, we need to set the example for our colleagues and future journalists on the proper and respectful processes of news reporting and writing.


Another article I checked out was this: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=54350.

While it isn't much of an "article" I suppose, it does have a lot of good resources for digging up facts and checking the backgrounds of people and companies. Just another good tool to check up on information and making your story the best -and errorless- it can be.

Up next... The Final Post.