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As we all well know, it’s easier today to get our hands on information than it ever has been in history. We can get pretty much anything we want by typing it into Google.
Once we here at the Free Press post a new story to gjfreepress.com, the world has access to it. With a click of the button, anyone can copy those words and send them along to someone else. The whole world can share it with one another.
But one thing hasn’t changed in the age of free-flowing information, and it never should.
If you sign your name to something, you should be the person who wrote it.
The Free Press newsroom found out Friday that this rule was broken in the pages of this newspaper.
Proof was provided to the Grand Junction Free Press that words in a column written Thursday, Feb. 1 by Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland were not her words, but were directly lifted from a publication put out by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
About 75 percent of the column was copied verbatim from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publication. No attribution was provided.
The same is true for a column that ran Jan. 25. Those words were lifted from the same source.
For this, we are sorry.
When the proof was shown to the Free Press, we acknowledged that it was indeed plagiarism, which is defined as “to present the ideas or words of another as one’s own.”
Members of the Mesa County Meth Task Force, of which Rowland is a member, agreed this past fall to write weekly columns for the Free Press that provide information on how to prevent youth from using meth in Mesa County. Rowland had been providing columns on behalf of the task force since December.
When asked about the plagiarism Friday, Rowland said she thought it was clear from the beginning that the series was based on Lions Quest curriculum, which aims to “cultivate capable and healthy young people of strong character,” according to the Lions Quest website.
Attribution to this curriculum was made in columns provided to the Free Press that ran Dec. 28, Jan. 4 and Jan. 11.
No attribution was provided with columns submitted to the Free Press in columns that ran Jan. 18, Jan. 25 and Feb. 1.
But it wouldn’t have mattered had it been, and we believe this is a moot point.
A disclaimer at the end of an article that reads “Source:” or “Adapted from” does not give someone the right to copy words verbatim, then sign their name at the top of the article as the author of a piece.
If you write it, you can sign it.
If someone else writes it, you should not take credit for writing it.
It’s that simple.
In Rowland’s defense, we live in an age of speech writers, ghost writers, secretaries, public-relations representatives, spokespeople, consultants and lastly, Google. The lines have become pretty blurred.
People write stuff all the time and allow other people to sign off on it as their own. It seems our society as a whole has forgotten a rule that would have gotten most of us suspended from seventh-grade English class. But at this newspaper, we don’t want to forget that rule.
One goal of the Free Press is to provide a forum for local readers to submit pictures, letters, stories and opinion pieces.
We intend to continue doing this in the future.
But if someone submits an article written by someone else and signs it as their own, we will point that out on this page, and the individual who posed as the writer will no longer be allowed to submit writing to this publication.
If a member of the Grand Junction Free Press staff is caught plagiarizing, it’s grounds for termination.
We hope to continue our relationship with the Mesa County Meth Task Force and run columns written by its members, but columns written by Commissioner Rowland will no longer appear in the Free Press.
<i>— Managing Editor Josh Nichols</i>
Once we here at the Free Press post a new story to gjfreepress.com, the world has access to it. With a click of the button, anyone can copy those words and send them along to someone else. The whole world can share it with one another.
But one thing hasn’t changed in the age of free-flowing information, and it never should.
If you sign your name to something, you should be the person who wrote it.
The Free Press newsroom found out Friday that this rule was broken in the pages of this newspaper.
Proof was provided to the Grand Junction Free Press that words in a column written Thursday, Feb. 1 by Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland were not her words, but were directly lifted from a publication put out by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
About 75 percent of the column was copied verbatim from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publication. No attribution was provided.
The same is true for a column that ran Jan. 25. Those words were lifted from the same source.
For this, we are sorry.
When the proof was shown to the Free Press, we acknowledged that it was indeed plagiarism, which is defined as “to present the ideas or words of another as one’s own.”
Members of the Mesa County Meth Task Force, of which Rowland is a member, agreed this past fall to write weekly columns for the Free Press that provide information on how to prevent youth from using meth in Mesa County. Rowland had been providing columns on behalf of the task force since December.
When asked about the plagiarism Friday, Rowland said she thought it was clear from the beginning that the series was based on Lions Quest curriculum, which aims to “cultivate capable and healthy young people of strong character,” according to the Lions Quest website.
Attribution to this curriculum was made in columns provided to the Free Press that ran Dec. 28, Jan. 4 and Jan. 11.
No attribution was provided with columns submitted to the Free Press in columns that ran Jan. 18, Jan. 25 and Feb. 1.
But it wouldn’t have mattered had it been, and we believe this is a moot point.
A disclaimer at the end of an article that reads “Source:” or “Adapted from” does not give someone the right to copy words verbatim, then sign their name at the top of the article as the author of a piece.
If you write it, you can sign it.
If someone else writes it, you should not take credit for writing it.
It’s that simple.
In Rowland’s defense, we live in an age of speech writers, ghost writers, secretaries, public-relations representatives, spokespeople, consultants and lastly, Google. The lines have become pretty blurred.
People write stuff all the time and allow other people to sign off on it as their own. It seems our society as a whole has forgotten a rule that would have gotten most of us suspended from seventh-grade English class. But at this newspaper, we don’t want to forget that rule.
One goal of the Free Press is to provide a forum for local readers to submit pictures, letters, stories and opinion pieces.
We intend to continue doing this in the future.
But if someone submits an article written by someone else and signs it as their own, we will point that out on this page, and the individual who posed as the writer will no longer be allowed to submit writing to this publication.
If a member of the Grand Junction Free Press staff is caught plagiarizing, it’s grounds for termination.
We hope to continue our relationship with the Mesa County Meth Task Force and run columns written by its members, but columns written by Commissioner Rowland will no longer appear in the Free Press.
<i>— Managing Editor Josh Nichols</i>
