Jayson Blair and the high school paper:
Using technology to keep young journalists honest
by Gary Clites
Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund's Adviser Update, Fall 2004
I met Jayson Blair while I was working on my Master’s Degree at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and later in my work at the college with the Maryland Scholastic Press Association. Everyone there was very proud of him for having scored major internships at the Boston Globe and the New York Times as an undergraduate, even prouder when the Times hired him full-time based upon those internships (Blair never graduated college).
No one could have predicted that Blair would set off one of the greatest scandals in journalism when, in 2003, he was accused of plagiarism and of manufacturing quotes and information in numerous articles for the Times. What has followed has been an earthquake-level restructuring in the business as newspaper after newspaper, looking into the work of their own staffs, have discovered similar issues of plagiarism and unethical journalism practices (these have included USA Today, the San Jose Mercury News, the Detroit News and BusinessWeek).
Those of us in scholastic journalism need to remember that Jayson Blair started out as a high school journalist, writing for the newspaper at Centreville High School in Virginia, and that problems with his reporting were first noted when he was working as a scholastic journalist for the Diamondback newspaper at Maryland. As the professional press works to put into place plagiarism and fact-checking systems to protect their publications and readers from further reporter abuse of the system, perhaps we in the world of scholastic journalism need to do the same. (For a great article on the professional issues, see “We Mean Business” in the June/July 2004 edition of American Journalism Review available online at www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3668.)
Luckily, much of the technology used by the professional press is also available to teachers of scholastic journalism. While some services can be had for a cost, others are available free or inexpensively over the web.
Ithenticate (www.ithenticate.com) is a web-based program that claims to match submitted documents to “billions of pages of digital information.” It generates “Originality Reports” that show any text matches from their database of archived web pages as well as the active web. A number of high profile publications have subscribed to the service and have made it by far the industry leader. Ithenticate is not available to teachers, but the company offers a less expensive companion service called Turnitin (www.turnitin.com) to educators. Though somewhat different than Ithenicate, Turnitin should allow you to trace any examples of student plagiarism quickly and easily.
There is no set cost for the Turnitin service. Rather, you must go to the website and fill out a quote request. I did so, noting that I am a high school teacher with just under 150 students per day (you read that right), and received a quote for $150 per year for the service, leading me to conclude that it might cost about a buck a student to subscribe. Pricey, but no more than you would pay for one annual critique from a major national service.
Another service that offers similar web-based plagiarism tools (and which creates similar “Originality Reports”) is MyDropBox (www.mydropbox.com). It also required me to request a quote, and returned a cost of $89 per year for one teacher with about 150 students. Both Turnitin and MyDropBox offer online tours which should help familiarize potential clients with their service and interfaces before any decision to purchase, but DropBox also offers a free 30 day trial. Because they are both web-based services, Turnitin and MyDropBox should work with either Windows or Mac based systems.
Downloadable programs offer less expensive alternatives to subscription services. Canexus offers the Eve Plagiarism Detection Service (www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml) for only $19.99 for unlimited use and claims to have performed over 86 million successful searches at press time. It claims to perform several complex searches of the Internet and to provide annotated findings of any plagiarism. Unfortunately, the program is only available for Windows-based systems. Another downloadable program available from C-Net is Plagiarism Finder 1.0.9 (www.download.com/Plagiarism-Finder/3000-2051-10298142.html). The program is Windows-only, and costs $125, but offers a free 30-day trial period.
Concerned about the cost of plagiarism programs and services? There are several ways you can perform searches for plagiarized materials yourself over the Internet free. Web-savvy teachers have known for years that Google’s “Advanced Search” (www.google.com/advanced_search) is a great tool for detecting plagiarism. Just look for a phrase (seven words or longer is a good rule) which you feel fairly certain the student did not write, and type it exactly as it appears in the “exact phrase” line of the search engine, and magically papers containing that phrase will appear, perhaps the one from which your student plagiarized.
Teacher Eric Unangst of the Berkshire School district in Ohio has taken the Google advanced search engine and (with their permission) has refined it with some of the same elements in the pay-per-search services to create Free Plagiarism Search (www.berkshire.k12.oh.us/beta/free_plagiarism_search.htm). Although still running in Beta (meaning it’s still under construction), the engine seems to provide good results according to my tests and, better yet, does so for no cost. Mr. Unangst’s good work is definitely worth a try before you invest serious money in a pay service.
Another free plagiarism search tool is 2.Learn.ca’s Plagiarism Sleuth tool (www.2learn.ca/mapset/SafetyNet/plagiarism/sleuth/StringSearchnew.html). A simple search engine interface, it allows you to search for exact phrases on seven different engines from one page. Just make sure you surround the phrase with quotation marks.
All the technological tools in the world will not guarantee your students perform ethically. More and more professional newspapers are putting into place fact-checking systems to keep their reporters honest. Maybe you can’t check on every story, but as the previously mentioned AJR story noted, many papers are putting into place policies of checking the quotes and information in several randomly chosen stories per issue in the hope that the threat of an examination will serve as a deterent to unethical behavior.
Technology can help keep scholastic journalists honest. But in the face of the Jayson Blair scandal and all those that have followed, maybe it’s time to add Fact Checker or Facts Editor to the standard list of newspaper jobs on the school newspaper masthead.
© Gary Clites, 2004
