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By Liz Quirin

Too Free With Someone Else's Work

I read an article about bloggers and the Catholic church recently, about how the church needs blogs and the bloggers need the church. I’m not quibbling with the main theme of the article, but one of the bloggers, a Dutch priest, said “professional journalists will have to get used to their material being taken, knowing that it amounts to free publicity and that if they are good journalists they will survive.”

In the good old days, that was called “plagiarism,” and I believe that without some permission, attribution or at least a nod to where the material originated, the very casual attitude we have about the validity of whatever we read on the web will become more of a problem than it already is. So much information is available on the web, and a certain percentage of it is not just a misrepresentation of the truth but more creative writing than news or journalism.

Another issue confronting the internet “news” people is what they do to photos. You can’t just take a photo and alter it any way you please. In the beginning, we were told that if we so much as flipped a photo so that it was “looking” the right way on a page, we had to acknowledge that. I was reminded of this when a cut line on a photo on the web described how a piece of paper had been electronically altered so no one could read what was on it. It was a photo from the “situation room” during the recent Navy Seals operation.

No matter what kind of news outlet we access, we ought to be able to trust that what we see and/or hear is valid and accurate. If something has been reprinted or reproduced, it should be accompanied by some kind of release. It requires lead time and jumping through a number of hoops sometimes, but I would prefer to do that than know that I have somehow used something without permission. It’s a question of ethics. It shouldn’t be just a casual “get over it” to an author whose work has been used without permission. I can’t think of a time over the last almost 20 years when we have denied anyone access to our information or photos.

If these bloggers have any idea how much time and effort goes into researching a story, finding the people to interview, perhaps traveling to different locations to find out the details, look into what makes this a good story and then, hopefully a “good read” when it is written and edited, perhaps they wouldn’t be so glib about reproducing someone’s work.

I am reminded of times when I would go to Central America and visit people who really had no resources. When I came home, I refused to take my children shopping, complained when they wanted new clothes and lectured them about what they really had as opposed to what they thought they had. Eventually, they asked me not to go on anymore of those trips until they grew up and went with me. It’s amazing what time and a different perspective can do to change someone’s mind and attitude without saying a word.