After POWO training last month when I had a chance to be one of the trainers, I wrote this post Generating Traffic to a blog/site and Maintaining Readership but there is part which I forgot to mention on the post ” Creating Content is Hard”. The fact is, creating content in general is not as hard as I had put it but creating exciting quality content is very hard. We have seen how at the moment everyone is struggling to come up with great content to attract the traffic and maintain the readership. Unfortunately, some are going on it in unethical way, what the smart ones call plagiarism. In the race to look more smart, more creative and more thoughtful a number of Kenyan journalists and journos wannabe have taken a route of “copy paste and call it mine”
Recently the cases of journalists stealing the content from bloggers is becoming a daily thing. The latest being the sworn enemy of the Facebook and Twitter numbskulls Caroline Mutoko. On Monday 3rd September 20012 Ms. Mutoko wrote a great article or so all we thought, titled “Letter To My 20-Something Self”. What many did not know is that back on Monday 17th October 2011 a blogger on crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com sat down and wrote this 20 Things I Want To Say To My Twenty something Self. After reading the two , you are left to wonder what will happen next to her , or will the Star newspaper take action or feel embarrassed. In other parts of the World, you would have expected her to be fired, suspended or resign but here..well here unfortunately probably nothing will happen! And I bet the other journalists will never talk about it..
Caroline Mutoko is not alone in the copy and paste game:
THIS –> @njaginjagz: Today #KTN showed some ofThandiwe Muriu’s photos on their 9am show without requesting permission orclarifying
— Buddha Blaze (@ItsBuddhaBlaze) September 10, 2012
HumanIPO for example have had a few cases of copy pasting..first from Wanjiku’s blog Wanjiku.co.ke and then from article written by Franklin Sunday on Business Daily
A day before Mutoko’s case was discovered by RobertAlai, Buddha Blaze (@Itsbughblaze) had his fair share of fight with Vibeweekly on twitter for copying his article word for word.
@vibeweekly NOT PROFESSIONAL. If you take a story from my blog. The least you can do is credit the story. Simple Journalistic etiquette.
— Buddha Blaze (@ItsBuddhaBlaze) September 10, 2012
Vibeweekly article was later deleted or removed from the site
As you can see it is becoming a disease in the media sector and something need to be done especially with the Media owners. Bloggers also need to take note. I know many a times as bloggers find interesting things in the interweb which they need to share , and doing so is not a problem but just indicate the source. The art of sharing is being done world over and people can look at the same from the blogging heavy weights like Guy Kawasaki
With the internet Kenyan journalists and others should realize that you can no-longer copy paste without being noticed, especially if you rank as among the famous one.People tend to trust the journalists and media at large to report the news and provide the analysis to the topical issues and events around them.It would be sad if people start to lose that trust on the media and the media houses.
The problem does not end with media and media houses. Anybody who have ever stepped in our Universities and colleges would understand what I am talking about. Majority of projects and research done by universities students are copy pasted and not original work. Internet has provided an easier route to doing that. It is the same reason why there are many research work being done by the students in our universities but you will never hear of them being published or talked about in the same level we see from the other countries.
Update
It seems Star has taken down the Mutoko’s post but as they say, internet does not forget. Here is the screenshot copy courtesy of cache
Doesn’t end there. The tv ad for Mali used Stingo images.
That part of copy pasting in universities is a cancer that i am not sure whether it will ever get cured. happens every time, all the time.
Photo credits too on blogs and websites ….guys should stop making other peoples photos there own
Those days when Twitter and Facebook were not popular, I called out a prominent tech columnist (Sam Wambugu) on Sunday Nation for copy-pasting from PC Magazine. I wrote him and email and cc’d Nation Newspapers, I did not get a reply.