ZapRatz
2008-08-07 16:17:27 UTC
Slate Magazine
Dude, You Stole My Article
How I investigated a suspicious alt weekly.
By Jody Rosen
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008, at 4:00 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2196810/
The saga began in the classical manner: with an e-mail about Jimmy
Buffett. Several weeks ago, I received a note from a Slate reader
drawing my attention to an article published in March 2008 in the
Bulletin, a free alternative weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, north
of Houston. "I believe your profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was
reproduced wholesale without attribution," the reader wrote. "I
thought you should know." I followed a link to "Spring Fling: Concerts
That Make the Holiday a Time to Party"* by Mark Williams, a feature
pegged to concert appearances by Buffett and country singer Miranda
Lambert. Sure enough, the article included 10 and a half paragraphs
copied nearly verbatim from "A Pirate Looks at 60," my Slate essay of
Jan. 9, 2007. My words were slightly reworked in places, and further
enlivened by eccentric use of em dashes and semicolonsa hallmark, I
would learn, of the Williamsian style. But the original text was
largely unaltered. For example, my Slate piece began this way:
Jimmy Buffett turned 60 this past Dec. 25, a day he undoubtedly
spent in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind, in close
proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case
with birthday number 50, which, as recounted in his autobiography A
Pirate Looks At Fifty (1998), Buffett celebrated by piloting his
private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia and
drinking copiously, while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals
going forward: "Learn celestial navigation," "Swim with dolphins,"
"Start therapy."
Mark Williams kicks off his consideration of Buffett with this
passage:
Buffett, who turned 60 on Christmas Day, likely spent the day in a
lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mindand in close proximity
to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with
birthday number 50; as recounted in his 1998 autobiography 'A Pirate
Looks At Fifty,' Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from
the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombiamerrily drinking while
contemplating "spirituality" and his goals: learning celestial
navigation, swimming with dolphins and starting therapy.
I recalled writing the Buffett piece, laboring on deadline into the
wee hours, hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table in my Brooklyn
home. How could I have known that I was previewing a concert to take
place some 15 months later at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in
Spring, Texas?
I decided to contact the Bulletin's editor about the plagiarism of my
work. On the Bulletin's Web site, I found data on the newspaper's
circulation (20,000) and advertising rates (cost of a one-eighth-page
vertical ad measuring 2½ inches by 6¼ inches: $105 per week). I
learned that the Bulletin had been in business since 1969 and had
received the 1998 "Most Improved Newspaper" Award from the Texas
Community Newspaper Association. I searched the Bulletin's archives,
skimming through music reviews, left-leaning political op-eds, local
news features, and previews of Montgomery County community happenings
("A Spooktacular Halloween: Concerts & Parties That Make This Season
Frighteningly Fun"). The phrase "send your comments to
***@thebulletin.com" was appended to many pieces, but the ghost
editor was never named. The Bulletin's site has no masthead, and most
articles dating from the past few years are unbylined. The only name
that appears consistently is Mark Williams, billed variously as "Music
Editor," "Bulletin Music Editor," and "The Bulletin Staff Writer."
Eventually, a Google search turned up the name of the Bulletin's
publisher, Mike Ladyman, whose surname did little to dispel the
feeling that I had been sucked into a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. But
Ladyman is entirely reala resident of Montgomery, Texas, who answered
his phone on the first ring and listened patiently as I informed him
of Mark Williams' misdeed. Our conversation was cordial and brief.
"I'll look into it," Ladyman said. "I'll speak to Mark about it." We
hung up, and I dashed off a follow-up e-mail with a mildly harrumphing
tone ("I do not think I need to tell you how poorly this unethical
practice reflects on your newspaper," etc.). And then, content that I
had put the matter to rest, I let it drop.
Except that I didn't let it drop. I found myself reading and rereading
and rereading again, poring over "Spring Fling" like a Talmudist. The
article has an odd, jangling tone, a product of its syntax ("their
loyalty has a vague spiritual overtones [sic]") and the ragged
suturing of my writing to Williams'. But was the prose surrounding my
own actually Williams' work? I began to wonder. When the borrowings
from my Slate essay end, four paragraphs from the bottom of the
article, Williams makes a jarring genre shift from think-piece to
celebrity profile, complete with boilerplate quotes from the singer
himself. Did the Bulletin really interview Jimmy Buffett? I Googled a
phrase from Williams' piece"leaves the Parrotheads with this head
scratcher"and the search returned two results: "Spring Fling" and a
USA Today piece from July 8, 2004, "Buffett takes country out for a
boat ride," written by Brian Mansfield.
It was then that I realized, with a pang of regret, that Mark Williams
is not my biggest fana reader so enraptured by Rosen's prose stylings
that he was driven to steal them. "Spring Fling" has at least three
sources: my Slate essay, Mansfield's USA Today piece, and a
Minneapolis Star-Tribune Miranda Lambert profile. And this is just the
beginning of Williams' collage-art music journalism.
Since 2005, the Bulletin has published dozens of stories under
Williams' byline that appear to be copied, whole or in part, from
other periodicals. Compare the Bulletin's Nov. 4, 2005, Franz
Ferdinand piece and this NME review, published five weeks prior; the
Bulletin's Steely Dan piece (July 14, 2006) and this article from the
Web site All About Jazz (July 4, 2006); the Bulletin's Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club feature (June 14, 2007) and an earlier Boston Globe
piece (May 25, 2007); the Bulletin's McKay Brothers article (Nov. 11,
2006) and this Dallas Observer item (Oct. 19, 2006); and the
Bulletin's "God and Country: More Popular Artists Are Now Singing a
Spiritual Tune" (Sept. 20, 2007) and the Billie Joe Shaver concert
review by Washington Post pop critic J. Freedom du Lac (Sept. 13,
2007). The Eagles piece published in the Bulletin on Dec. 13, 2007 is
a nearly word-for-word recapitulation of David Fricke's Rolling Stone
review (Nov. 1, 2007). Mark Williams sought inspiration from USA Today
for his features on Paul Simon (USA Today version; Bulletin version)
and Tom Petty (USA Today version; Bulletin version). The Evanston,
Ill.-based blog Pop Matters is the apparent source of articles on
Dwight Yoakam (Pop Matters version; Bulletin version) and Matthew
Sweet and Susanna Hoffs (Pop Matters version; Bulletin version). And
then there's "Crazy About 'Crazy' " (March 2, 2007), Williams'
deconstruction of the monster 2006 pop hit by Gnarls Barkleyan
article that bears a striking resemblance to "Crazy for 'Crazy',"
published six months earlier in Slate.
And so on. Uncovering these sources is a matter of choosing the right
phrases to dump into Google, not a difficult feat for anyone
moderately attuned to writerly rhythms. Often, the keywords leap right
out at you. The Willie Nelson appreciation currently headlining the
Bulletin's Web site begins: "Willie Nelson is so impeccably grizzled
that he has moved into a realm to which the phrase 'elder statesman'
scarcely begins to do justice"a sentence with a twang more British
than Texan, probably because it was first published in the U.K.
Guardian.
Shortly after realizing I might not have been Williams' only
plagiarism victim, I called Mike Ladyman a second time. Ladyman speaks
in a soothing singsong tone and has a genial telephone manner. But he
seemed eager to cut short our conversation and uninterested in the
details of my allegations. I pressed the point: "I think there's a
serious pattern of plagiarism here. You should really look into this."
Ladyman's reply was vague: "Well, I've already mentioned it to Mark.
So that's under way. E-mail me the articles and I'll take a look." And
then we hung up.
Whereupon I returned to surfing the Bulletin site, digging deeper into
the newspaper's archivesand turning up dozens more suspect articles.
Like many alt weeklies, the paper's bread-and-butter is politics, and
from the spring of 2005 on, its political op-eds comprise an
apparently unbroken sequence of pilfered prose. The Bulletin's
archives reveal a strong preference for the online magazine Salonin
particular, the punditry of Joe Conason and Sidney Blumenthal.
Compiling a complete annotated list of articles would require the
services of a half-dozen unpaid interns, so a few examples will have
to suffice. Compare:
* Conason's "The Only Way Out," Salon, Dec. 3, 2005, and the
Bulletin's "We Can Work It Out," Dec. 9, 2005
* Conason's "Alberto Gonzales' Coup D'Etat," Salon, Feb. 9, 2007,
and the Bulletin's "Let's Just Burn the Constitution," Feb. 16, 2007
* Blumenthal's "Above the Rule of Law," the Guardian, Aug. 5,
2005, and the Bulletin's "Bush's Dirty War," Aug. 12, 2005
* Blumenthal's "Bush's Betrayal of History," Salon, Nov. 17, 2005,
and the Bulletin's "Truth Is for Traitors," Nov. 25, 2005
* Walter Shapiro's "A Decisive Year for 'the Decider'," Salon,
Dec. 26, 2006, and the Bulletin's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,"
Dec. 29, 2006
* Farhad Manjoo's "Bush's Sinking Popularity," Salon, April 29,
2005, and the Bulletin's "Sinking Ship?," May 6, 2005
* Joan Walsh's "Bye-Bye, Bullies!," Salon, Nov. 13, 2006, and the
Bulletin's "Calamity for the Corrupt," Nov. 17, 2006
* Brad DeLong's "Mike Huckabee Wants To Abolish the IRS," Salon,
Jan. 7, 2008, and the Bulletin's "Down With the IRS," Jan. 17, 2008
The Bulletin's rampant borrowing has not gone totally unnoticed. A May
2007 post on a now-dormant "Bulletin watchdog" blog, Nation of Mice,
points out that an article on Rudy Giuliani was "completely
plagiarized from Salon.com." "Low and behold, will The Bulletin
Publisher and Editor Mike Ladyman ever give credit to pre-published
articles in his liberal rag," the writer asks, not quite grammatically
but not unreasonably.
I have tried in vain to put that question to Ladyman directly. But
since June 17the date when I first contacted the Bulletin's publisher
and when we had our two phone conversationsI have had no
communication with Ladyman or Mark Williams or any other member of the
Bulletin's staff. I phoned Ladyman repeatedly at four different
numbers, but he has not answered my calls. He has failed to respond to
my voice-mail messages. I sent Ladyman three e-mails, all on June 17,
to which he never replied. But I suspect that he received them: The
e-mails detailed plagiarism in three articles bylined to
Williams"Spring Fling," the Eagles review, and the Dwight Yoakam
reviewand all three pieces have since disappeared from the Bulletin's
Web archives. No correction or retraction was ever issued.
At times over the last month, I've doubted that the Bulletin actually
exists. A tiny newspaper from the Houston suburbs, filled week after
week with bowdlerized Joe Conason columns and record reviews airlifted
from the pages of Slate? It seemed preposterous, and the longer I
spent squinting into the mustard-and-magenta glow of the Bulletin's
Web 0.0-quality Internet site, the more I began to suspect that I was
the dupe of a conceptual art prank, a cheeky Borgesian commentary on
the slipperiness of language and authorship. Or something.
But I telephoned the offices of Montgomery County's reputable daily,
the Courier, and reporters there assured me that the Bulletin indeed
exists. A Courier staffer picked up a copy at a shop in Conroe, Texas,
and mailed it to me, and as I type these words I am looking at the
front page of the Bulletin's latest edition, Volume 38, Issue 26, with
a color cover photograph of Austin blues-rockers the Band of Heathens
beneath the headline "Hot Summer, Hot Texas Music: New Lone Star CD
Releases That Make the Summer Sizzle."
It is a tabloid format newspaper of just 16 pages. There are a couple
of pages of classifieds, and lots of advertisements for local
businesses: restaurants, real-estate brokers, the Schlitterbahn
Waterparks. Unlike the Bulletin's Web site, the paper-proper has a
masthead, which lists five staffers: Ladyman ("Publisher & Editor"),
Williams ("Music Editor," "Staff Writer"), an account executive, a
listings guy, and a graphic designer. (I tried to reach all of these
Bulletin employees by phone, to no avail.) The masthead also reveals
that the Bulletin is part of the Alternative Weekly Network, a
nationwide consortium of 110 weekly publications.
As for the articles: more of the same. The cover feature on those
sizzling summer CDs seems cribbed from three sources: an
Allaboutjazz.com piece about Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, an
Amazon.com customer review of a Band of Heathens CD, and a Jambase.com
review of the band Reckless Kelly. A review of the new Coldplay album
looks an awful lot like a review first published in the Daily
Telegraph. An op-ed titled "Environmentally Incorrect: How McCain Can
Prove He Won't Be Like Bush" is apparently a rejiggered Joe Conason
column. Even the Bulletin's letters to the editor appear not to be
letters at all but op-ed pieces written by a couple of professors and
published elsewhere first.
In other words, with the exception of the local events listings, every
single item in the June 3-July 10 Bulletin is suspicious. Indeed, I
wonder: In purely statistical terms, do the articles in the Montgomery
County Bulletin amount to the greatest plagiarism scandal in the
annals of American journalism?
But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trendor even ahead of its time.
The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have
made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and
Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator.
Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style
21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media:
publishing the Napster of newspapers.
In any case, there is at least one example of original writing in the
current Bulletin. At the top of the masthead section is a note about
the paper's distributionan obvious point of pride for Mike Ladyman.
It reads: "The Bulletin is available free to readers and distributes
20,000 papers every Thursday at 572 locations." There then follows
this sentence:
The Bulletin is distributed at outdoor racks, book stores, barber
shops, hair salons, nail salons, cleaners, coffee houses, liquor
stores, meat markets, convenience stores, grocery stores, brake shops,
tire stores, transmission shops, body shops, insurance agents, banks,
libraries, hotels, motels, gyms, drug stores, clinics, hospitals,
doctors, dentist [sic], chiropractors, college campuses, restaurants,
movie theaters, bars, night clubs, ice houses, etc."
Now, this is a great piece of writing, an epic catalog in the Homeric
mode: a poem, a poem, forsooth! Journalists hallow truth, but beauty
trumps truth, and when the list of Bulletin distribution locales
hurtles forward in breakneck rhythm ("transmission shops, body shops,
insurance agents"), rising to that ringing final cadenceice houses,
etc.who but the hard-hearted and the tin-eared could deny the beauty
of those words? I may have to borrow them sometime.
sidebar
Return to article
Note to reader: Three of the Bulletin articles mentioned in this
piece"Spring Fling," "Remembering Buck," and "Eagles on the Edge of
Eden"were taken down from the paper's site after Jody Rosen contacted
the newspaper's publisher about possible plagiarism. Slate captured
cached versions of the articles, which are linked to in this piece.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can
be reached at ***@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2196810/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Dude, You Stole My Article
How I investigated a suspicious alt weekly.
By Jody Rosen
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008, at 4:00 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2196810/
The saga began in the classical manner: with an e-mail about Jimmy
Buffett. Several weeks ago, I received a note from a Slate reader
drawing my attention to an article published in March 2008 in the
Bulletin, a free alternative weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, north
of Houston. "I believe your profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was
reproduced wholesale without attribution," the reader wrote. "I
thought you should know." I followed a link to "Spring Fling: Concerts
That Make the Holiday a Time to Party"* by Mark Williams, a feature
pegged to concert appearances by Buffett and country singer Miranda
Lambert. Sure enough, the article included 10 and a half paragraphs
copied nearly verbatim from "A Pirate Looks at 60," my Slate essay of
Jan. 9, 2007. My words were slightly reworked in places, and further
enlivened by eccentric use of em dashes and semicolonsa hallmark, I
would learn, of the Williamsian style. But the original text was
largely unaltered. For example, my Slate piece began this way:
Jimmy Buffett turned 60 this past Dec. 25, a day he undoubtedly
spent in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind, in close
proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case
with birthday number 50, which, as recounted in his autobiography A
Pirate Looks At Fifty (1998), Buffett celebrated by piloting his
private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia and
drinking copiously, while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals
going forward: "Learn celestial navigation," "Swim with dolphins,"
"Start therapy."
Mark Williams kicks off his consideration of Buffett with this
passage:
Buffett, who turned 60 on Christmas Day, likely spent the day in a
lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mindand in close proximity
to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with
birthday number 50; as recounted in his 1998 autobiography 'A Pirate
Looks At Fifty,' Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from
the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombiamerrily drinking while
contemplating "spirituality" and his goals: learning celestial
navigation, swimming with dolphins and starting therapy.
I recalled writing the Buffett piece, laboring on deadline into the
wee hours, hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table in my Brooklyn
home. How could I have known that I was previewing a concert to take
place some 15 months later at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in
Spring, Texas?
I decided to contact the Bulletin's editor about the plagiarism of my
work. On the Bulletin's Web site, I found data on the newspaper's
circulation (20,000) and advertising rates (cost of a one-eighth-page
vertical ad measuring 2½ inches by 6¼ inches: $105 per week). I
learned that the Bulletin had been in business since 1969 and had
received the 1998 "Most Improved Newspaper" Award from the Texas
Community Newspaper Association. I searched the Bulletin's archives,
skimming through music reviews, left-leaning political op-eds, local
news features, and previews of Montgomery County community happenings
("A Spooktacular Halloween: Concerts & Parties That Make This Season
Frighteningly Fun"). The phrase "send your comments to
***@thebulletin.com" was appended to many pieces, but the ghost
editor was never named. The Bulletin's site has no masthead, and most
articles dating from the past few years are unbylined. The only name
that appears consistently is Mark Williams, billed variously as "Music
Editor," "Bulletin Music Editor," and "The Bulletin Staff Writer."
Eventually, a Google search turned up the name of the Bulletin's
publisher, Mike Ladyman, whose surname did little to dispel the
feeling that I had been sucked into a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. But
Ladyman is entirely reala resident of Montgomery, Texas, who answered
his phone on the first ring and listened patiently as I informed him
of Mark Williams' misdeed. Our conversation was cordial and brief.
"I'll look into it," Ladyman said. "I'll speak to Mark about it." We
hung up, and I dashed off a follow-up e-mail with a mildly harrumphing
tone ("I do not think I need to tell you how poorly this unethical
practice reflects on your newspaper," etc.). And then, content that I
had put the matter to rest, I let it drop.
Except that I didn't let it drop. I found myself reading and rereading
and rereading again, poring over "Spring Fling" like a Talmudist. The
article has an odd, jangling tone, a product of its syntax ("their
loyalty has a vague spiritual overtones [sic]") and the ragged
suturing of my writing to Williams'. But was the prose surrounding my
own actually Williams' work? I began to wonder. When the borrowings
from my Slate essay end, four paragraphs from the bottom of the
article, Williams makes a jarring genre shift from think-piece to
celebrity profile, complete with boilerplate quotes from the singer
himself. Did the Bulletin really interview Jimmy Buffett? I Googled a
phrase from Williams' piece"leaves the Parrotheads with this head
scratcher"and the search returned two results: "Spring Fling" and a
USA Today piece from July 8, 2004, "Buffett takes country out for a
boat ride," written by Brian Mansfield.
It was then that I realized, with a pang of regret, that Mark Williams
is not my biggest fana reader so enraptured by Rosen's prose stylings
that he was driven to steal them. "Spring Fling" has at least three
sources: my Slate essay, Mansfield's USA Today piece, and a
Minneapolis Star-Tribune Miranda Lambert profile. And this is just the
beginning of Williams' collage-art music journalism.
Since 2005, the Bulletin has published dozens of stories under
Williams' byline that appear to be copied, whole or in part, from
other periodicals. Compare the Bulletin's Nov. 4, 2005, Franz
Ferdinand piece and this NME review, published five weeks prior; the
Bulletin's Steely Dan piece (July 14, 2006) and this article from the
Web site All About Jazz (July 4, 2006); the Bulletin's Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club feature (June 14, 2007) and an earlier Boston Globe
piece (May 25, 2007); the Bulletin's McKay Brothers article (Nov. 11,
2006) and this Dallas Observer item (Oct. 19, 2006); and the
Bulletin's "God and Country: More Popular Artists Are Now Singing a
Spiritual Tune" (Sept. 20, 2007) and the Billie Joe Shaver concert
review by Washington Post pop critic J. Freedom du Lac (Sept. 13,
2007). The Eagles piece published in the Bulletin on Dec. 13, 2007 is
a nearly word-for-word recapitulation of David Fricke's Rolling Stone
review (Nov. 1, 2007). Mark Williams sought inspiration from USA Today
for his features on Paul Simon (USA Today version; Bulletin version)
and Tom Petty (USA Today version; Bulletin version). The Evanston,
Ill.-based blog Pop Matters is the apparent source of articles on
Dwight Yoakam (Pop Matters version; Bulletin version) and Matthew
Sweet and Susanna Hoffs (Pop Matters version; Bulletin version). And
then there's "Crazy About 'Crazy' " (March 2, 2007), Williams'
deconstruction of the monster 2006 pop hit by Gnarls Barkleyan
article that bears a striking resemblance to "Crazy for 'Crazy',"
published six months earlier in Slate.
And so on. Uncovering these sources is a matter of choosing the right
phrases to dump into Google, not a difficult feat for anyone
moderately attuned to writerly rhythms. Often, the keywords leap right
out at you. The Willie Nelson appreciation currently headlining the
Bulletin's Web site begins: "Willie Nelson is so impeccably grizzled
that he has moved into a realm to which the phrase 'elder statesman'
scarcely begins to do justice"a sentence with a twang more British
than Texan, probably because it was first published in the U.K.
Guardian.
Shortly after realizing I might not have been Williams' only
plagiarism victim, I called Mike Ladyman a second time. Ladyman speaks
in a soothing singsong tone and has a genial telephone manner. But he
seemed eager to cut short our conversation and uninterested in the
details of my allegations. I pressed the point: "I think there's a
serious pattern of plagiarism here. You should really look into this."
Ladyman's reply was vague: "Well, I've already mentioned it to Mark.
So that's under way. E-mail me the articles and I'll take a look." And
then we hung up.
Whereupon I returned to surfing the Bulletin site, digging deeper into
the newspaper's archivesand turning up dozens more suspect articles.
Like many alt weeklies, the paper's bread-and-butter is politics, and
from the spring of 2005 on, its political op-eds comprise an
apparently unbroken sequence of pilfered prose. The Bulletin's
archives reveal a strong preference for the online magazine Salonin
particular, the punditry of Joe Conason and Sidney Blumenthal.
Compiling a complete annotated list of articles would require the
services of a half-dozen unpaid interns, so a few examples will have
to suffice. Compare:
* Conason's "The Only Way Out," Salon, Dec. 3, 2005, and the
Bulletin's "We Can Work It Out," Dec. 9, 2005
* Conason's "Alberto Gonzales' Coup D'Etat," Salon, Feb. 9, 2007,
and the Bulletin's "Let's Just Burn the Constitution," Feb. 16, 2007
* Blumenthal's "Above the Rule of Law," the Guardian, Aug. 5,
2005, and the Bulletin's "Bush's Dirty War," Aug. 12, 2005
* Blumenthal's "Bush's Betrayal of History," Salon, Nov. 17, 2005,
and the Bulletin's "Truth Is for Traitors," Nov. 25, 2005
* Walter Shapiro's "A Decisive Year for 'the Decider'," Salon,
Dec. 26, 2006, and the Bulletin's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,"
Dec. 29, 2006
* Farhad Manjoo's "Bush's Sinking Popularity," Salon, April 29,
2005, and the Bulletin's "Sinking Ship?," May 6, 2005
* Joan Walsh's "Bye-Bye, Bullies!," Salon, Nov. 13, 2006, and the
Bulletin's "Calamity for the Corrupt," Nov. 17, 2006
* Brad DeLong's "Mike Huckabee Wants To Abolish the IRS," Salon,
Jan. 7, 2008, and the Bulletin's "Down With the IRS," Jan. 17, 2008
The Bulletin's rampant borrowing has not gone totally unnoticed. A May
2007 post on a now-dormant "Bulletin watchdog" blog, Nation of Mice,
points out that an article on Rudy Giuliani was "completely
plagiarized from Salon.com." "Low and behold, will The Bulletin
Publisher and Editor Mike Ladyman ever give credit to pre-published
articles in his liberal rag," the writer asks, not quite grammatically
but not unreasonably.
I have tried in vain to put that question to Ladyman directly. But
since June 17the date when I first contacted the Bulletin's publisher
and when we had our two phone conversationsI have had no
communication with Ladyman or Mark Williams or any other member of the
Bulletin's staff. I phoned Ladyman repeatedly at four different
numbers, but he has not answered my calls. He has failed to respond to
my voice-mail messages. I sent Ladyman three e-mails, all on June 17,
to which he never replied. But I suspect that he received them: The
e-mails detailed plagiarism in three articles bylined to
Williams"Spring Fling," the Eagles review, and the Dwight Yoakam
reviewand all three pieces have since disappeared from the Bulletin's
Web archives. No correction or retraction was ever issued.
At times over the last month, I've doubted that the Bulletin actually
exists. A tiny newspaper from the Houston suburbs, filled week after
week with bowdlerized Joe Conason columns and record reviews airlifted
from the pages of Slate? It seemed preposterous, and the longer I
spent squinting into the mustard-and-magenta glow of the Bulletin's
Web 0.0-quality Internet site, the more I began to suspect that I was
the dupe of a conceptual art prank, a cheeky Borgesian commentary on
the slipperiness of language and authorship. Or something.
But I telephoned the offices of Montgomery County's reputable daily,
the Courier, and reporters there assured me that the Bulletin indeed
exists. A Courier staffer picked up a copy at a shop in Conroe, Texas,
and mailed it to me, and as I type these words I am looking at the
front page of the Bulletin's latest edition, Volume 38, Issue 26, with
a color cover photograph of Austin blues-rockers the Band of Heathens
beneath the headline "Hot Summer, Hot Texas Music: New Lone Star CD
Releases That Make the Summer Sizzle."
It is a tabloid format newspaper of just 16 pages. There are a couple
of pages of classifieds, and lots of advertisements for local
businesses: restaurants, real-estate brokers, the Schlitterbahn
Waterparks. Unlike the Bulletin's Web site, the paper-proper has a
masthead, which lists five staffers: Ladyman ("Publisher & Editor"),
Williams ("Music Editor," "Staff Writer"), an account executive, a
listings guy, and a graphic designer. (I tried to reach all of these
Bulletin employees by phone, to no avail.) The masthead also reveals
that the Bulletin is part of the Alternative Weekly Network, a
nationwide consortium of 110 weekly publications.
As for the articles: more of the same. The cover feature on those
sizzling summer CDs seems cribbed from three sources: an
Allaboutjazz.com piece about Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, an
Amazon.com customer review of a Band of Heathens CD, and a Jambase.com
review of the band Reckless Kelly. A review of the new Coldplay album
looks an awful lot like a review first published in the Daily
Telegraph. An op-ed titled "Environmentally Incorrect: How McCain Can
Prove He Won't Be Like Bush" is apparently a rejiggered Joe Conason
column. Even the Bulletin's letters to the editor appear not to be
letters at all but op-ed pieces written by a couple of professors and
published elsewhere first.
In other words, with the exception of the local events listings, every
single item in the June 3-July 10 Bulletin is suspicious. Indeed, I
wonder: In purely statistical terms, do the articles in the Montgomery
County Bulletin amount to the greatest plagiarism scandal in the
annals of American journalism?
But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trendor even ahead of its time.
The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have
made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and
Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator.
Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style
21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media:
publishing the Napster of newspapers.
In any case, there is at least one example of original writing in the
current Bulletin. At the top of the masthead section is a note about
the paper's distributionan obvious point of pride for Mike Ladyman.
It reads: "The Bulletin is available free to readers and distributes
20,000 papers every Thursday at 572 locations." There then follows
this sentence:
The Bulletin is distributed at outdoor racks, book stores, barber
shops, hair salons, nail salons, cleaners, coffee houses, liquor
stores, meat markets, convenience stores, grocery stores, brake shops,
tire stores, transmission shops, body shops, insurance agents, banks,
libraries, hotels, motels, gyms, drug stores, clinics, hospitals,
doctors, dentist [sic], chiropractors, college campuses, restaurants,
movie theaters, bars, night clubs, ice houses, etc."
Now, this is a great piece of writing, an epic catalog in the Homeric
mode: a poem, a poem, forsooth! Journalists hallow truth, but beauty
trumps truth, and when the list of Bulletin distribution locales
hurtles forward in breakneck rhythm ("transmission shops, body shops,
insurance agents"), rising to that ringing final cadenceice houses,
etc.who but the hard-hearted and the tin-eared could deny the beauty
of those words? I may have to borrow them sometime.
sidebar
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Note to reader: Three of the Bulletin articles mentioned in this
piece"Spring Fling," "Remembering Buck," and "Eagles on the Edge of
Eden"were taken down from the paper's site after Jody Rosen contacted
the newspaper's publisher about possible plagiarism. Slate captured
cached versions of the articles, which are linked to in this piece.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can
be reached at ***@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2196810/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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