Thoughts on the Mitch Albom paper

I'll be passing back your graded papers tomorrow. For the most part, they were quite good. Grades would have been slightly higher if more of you had simply followed the assignment guidelines. In particular, I encountered repeated problems with insufficient and nonexistent citations. As I said in the assignment:

Strictly speaking, this is not a research paper, but neither is it an essay that you can write off the top of your head. I want you to do your homework on this. Be sure to cite all sources; the citation format is unimportant, but transparency and thoroughness are essential.

I also ran into a few problems with misspelled proper names, and with some of you citing only one code of ethics when I had specified two. (It would have been especially nice if more than a few of you had discovered the full text of the Detroit Free Press' code rather than relying solely on SPJ and ASNE.) Let's keep these things in mind as we move forward with the research paper, which will count for 30 percent of your grade.

Two issues regarding Mitch Albom's conduct came up over and over in your papers. Though there are no right or wrong answers to some of these ethical dilemmas, there are a couple of questions that I'd like you to think about.

1. Was Albom's column of April 3, 2005, an isolated incident? Many of you said that it was, which is why you decided to temper justice with mercy. Yet you will note that the Free Press' internal investigation revealed that there were other times when Albom wrote about games and news conferences as if he were there when he was not.

I was particularly struck by the Chicago Bears-Detroit Lions game that he "covered" by watching television. One of his editors suggested that Albom make it clear in his column that he was not actually at the stadium, and then noticed, after publication, that Albom had failed to take him up on that suggestion. The editor apparently did nothing, which speaks to extent of Albom's celebrity big-footing in the Free Press newsroom.

I would also suggest that if the two basketball players had done Albom the favor of actually showing up at the Saturday game, no one ever would have been the wiser.

2. Did Albom plagiarize? Here we get into an area in which I have to side more with Albom than with his critics. The Free Press has a strict rule that all quotes not gathered by its reporters must be attributed to the original source. That is an excellent rule. But it also goes against the customary practice at many news organizations.

Albom said his own rule is that quotations that were essentially already out there in the public domain do not need to be attributed. To the extent that Albom actually succeeded in following that rule, I think most journalists would agree he was acting ethically. As long as a reader would not reasonably believe that Albom himself had interviewed the person being quoted, then it's not plagiarism.

That's not to say it's good practice — as we know, it's prohibited at the Free Press. And there are times when sloppiness could lead a journalist not to cite a quote that should be cited. But "plagiarism" is probably too strong a term for what we're talking about here.

A final note: On many of your papers, I've corrected you for writing that Albom's offending column was published on April 2 rather than April 3. I later noticed that LexisNexis incorrectly stamped the publication date of Albom's column as being April 2. That probably reflects the fact that it moved out over the wires on April 2 for publication on April 3. In any case, this had no effect whatsoever on your grades. But it shows that it helps to check everything.