Dear ‘Journalist’ Who Ripped Me Off: I Don’t Forgive You (Updated Again)

As a full-time freelance journalist by trade, it’s my job to be creative. Every conversation I have, new person I meet, book I read — anything, really — could be a potential source of new inspiration. I’m constantly fidgeting with the Notes app on my iPhone or opening up a new Google doc to jot down ideas about my next writing project.

While most of these ideas get written down, only some of them get developed into formal pitches. I have hundreds of half-baked ideas in various stages of disrepair, lying in wait to be developed into feature-length or short-form pitches to prospective editors. Many of them are on related themes or subjects about which I’ve written in the past — music, collecting, travel, television, movies — and a few even tackle topics outside of my comfort zone. As a graduate of a liberal arts college, I’d like to believe that I can write about any subject, intelligently, if I put my mind to it. I’ve held this ethos ever since I worked at the Writing Center at Connecticut College, where I coached not only English majors, but also those studying the sciences, economics, and history how to better flesh out their ideas and write and argue stronger theses. Not to mention create proper citations. It was basically my first paid editorship.

One of my favorite practices as a professional writer is to include connective tissue between as many of my published works as possible. It’s kind of a “breadcrumb trail” I leave for my most faithful readers (likely my wife and parents, but I dream of someone out there who reads all of my writing as soon as it hits the newsstands or Internet). In February 2014, I published a piece on MensHealth.com about 10 items that you might’ve owned as a child, which might still be buried away in your parents’ attic, that could make you “rich” in today’s market (i.e. on eBay or Craigslist or a person-to-person transaction). In it, I picked 10 different items — toys, trading cards, action figures — and one of them was a Sports Illustrated for Kids issue from the 1990s, featuring basketball player Larry Johnson on the cover. Back in those days, SI for Kids included a tear-out section in the middle of the magazine, featuring a block of perforated trading cards. These cards featured a variety of athletes from sports that actual trading card companies like Topps and Upper Deck historically avoided: the Olympics, racing, and tennis. Kids could either separate the stamp-like blocks into individual cards, or leave them intact in the magazine as a collectors item. That Johnson issue has become a prized possession among golf fans and collectors, because one of the cards in the insert is Tiger Woods’ first official trading card. If you can find that magazine with the middle section intact and in decent condition, it’s worth anywhere from $500-$1,500, depending on the buyer. I got this estimate (and a funny quote) from a Sports Illustrated magazine collector, Scott Smith, who has been collecting since the early ‘70s. The catch? Since 1982, Smith has gotten all of them autographed by their cover star or stars (he owns nearly 3,000 signed covers; roughly 94 percent of every single SI in history). I remember interviewing Smith for about 15 minutes that first time, even though I only used a tiny portion of the transcription for the finished Men’s Health listicle. But he gave such an animated interview that I thought it would be cool to someday write a feature profile on him and his collection. I got my wish from February–March 2015.

If you’ve read or followed my work, you’ll know that I write for a bunch of different online and print publications. This is by design: My goal is to cover as much territory and I write for as many different editors as possible. Sometimes it works out really well, and the writer-editor relationship flourishes; sometimes, I publish just one piece and call it a day. It’s never personal; it’s just how the business works. One of my favorite publications to write for is Defy Media’s Made Man (www.mademan.com). The editors there have allowed me to cover a host of different subjects since December 2013, including music, booze, and collecting. (Not bad, right?) For example, I write a regular series for Made Man called “Oral Hit-story,” in which I interview songwriters about their biggest hit or most recognizable track. It’s a tremendous amount of fun; it doesn’t even feel like work.

Made Man managing editor Steve Mazzucchi accepted a pitch of mine for his site’s then-new series, “Obsessed,” which covers men who have an insane obsession. It could be anything: a hobby, an after-work project, or collection. I had actually written the first feature in the series about Joe Curcio, who has an incredible Kenner Starting Lineup collection, so I knew the territory. (Per my note above about “connective tissue,” Curcio was also quoted in the same MensHealth.com piece, and I’d talked to him extensively for a feature I’d written for Beckett Sports Card Monthly about the Kenner Starting Lineup toy line.) The next “Obsessed” feature, of course, would be on Scott Smith.

I’m fairly certain I started to research Smith and dabble in a first draft as early as the end of February, because all of my Google doc time-stamps reflect an early March finish for the piece. I interviewed the collector via phone on March 5 and did the full transcription myself on March 6, getting 37 minutes of Smith’s comment on tape (I had originally scheduled 10–15 minutes with him). I know that I spent an enormous amount of time working on the piece, because at the time, I hardly had any other writing gigs; it was a really slow time for me freelance-wise, and this piece was something I could get buried in. Plus, for the entire month of March, I was sharing a 200 square-foot apartment in Oakland, California (up a steep, treacherously windy hill), with my wife and puppy, so I was cramped, isolated, and depressed about my lack of work prospects. The last time-stamp on the piece was March 10, so I completed it in just a handful of days.

After I finished writing the Smith profile, my work was hardly done: I spent the remainder of the month trying to wrangle photographs for the piece and attempting and failing to set up a photo-shoot with Smith, who was extremely busy (my editor is based in New York City and offered to drive to New Jersey to do a shoot with Smith, if he was interested). Even though the images Smith sent me weren’t award-winning, my editor produced some awesome composites and basically made something out of nothing (the sign of a truly great web editor and producer). I’m not positive when I filed the physical piece to him, but it was around the end of March. The last bit of copy I wrote for it was on March 26, when I filed several photo captions to my editor to run with the various composites he’d created.

The piece was supposed to run the last week of March but got bumped to the following week. It again got bumped to the following Wednesday (April 8). But it finally published then, even though there’s no time-stamp on Made Man: http://www.mademan.com/obsessed-scott-smith-signed-si-super-collector/ If you view the page’s source code in your web browser, you’ll find the April 8 time-stamp; my editor made some minor tweaks to the piece that day based on some feedback I’d received from Smith (I always send my pieces to the sources I work with). After sending the updated link to Smith, I shared the link on my own social platforms, as I do all my published works: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Robbed Twice in Two Days

A day after my Man Made piece published, unbeknownst to me, the following piece appeared on News.com.au, one of Australia’s most popular news sites and a subsidiary of News Corporation: http://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/autograph-hunter-scott-smith-lifts-the-lid-on-the-stars/story-fno61i58-1227298526988 (Read it, if you will; it will only take a few minutes.)

Clearly, Jai Bednall, the Australian journalist who produced it, plagiarized my piece, only once citing and linking properly to a “feature on mademan.com,” not even bothering to give me — the journalist who originally wrote and reported the piece — proper attribution. Maybe Bednall assumed nobody would notice the lack of credit, or that Made Man was too obscure a website for anyone in Australia to really care. After all, Defy Media is no News Corp. But as one of my former employers, Adweek, recently noted, Defy Media has a “small but mighty presence [online].”

It’s clear that Bednall, who likely thought (and still thinks) he was “aggregating” my piece, did it in a rather sloppy manner. In his second reference to the source website, he refers to Made Man as “manmade.com,” a design consultancy not in any way related to Defy Media. If you compare Bednall’s chop-shop job to my original, he cherry-picks almost every exact quote I used in my story, most without attribution. He also lifts the basic story idea but lazily restructures it under a variety of headings (“Michael Jordan,” “Wayne Gretzky,” et al.). Most of the story’s facts are lifted, too, some of which he wouldn’t have known without my original reporting. For example, the information Bednall notes about Mike Tyson and the session he had with Smith was exclusive to my piece (it’s not in Smith’s website or anywhere else, as far as I can tell; somebody, please, correct me if I’m wrong). Also, the bit about the SI swimsuit models being the “easiest” to track down couldn’t have been gleaned from anywhere else on the web. I asked Smith that question directly, and he answered in kind.

Soon after “his story” published, Bednall tweeted about it on April 9: https://twitter.com/jaibednall/status/586371296272846848

***

I’m going to assume that the New York Post’s website, nypost.com, and News.com.au have an online syndication deal, because this link turned up a day later on nypost.com: http://nypost.com/2015/04/10/si-autograph-hound-kate-upton-an-ugly-human-being/

If you compare this version to Bednall’s copy-job, it’s almost identical. However, there are a few key differences I was able to pick out, which leads me to believe somebody at the Post looked at Bednall’s version, gave it a light edit, and was at least aware of my original piece. Here are a few of the most noticeable changes: The headline is slightly different; the images are different (neither site bothered to source any images directly from Smith); and the hyperlink to the source “mademan.com” in the third graf was swapped onto the other side of the clause. The Post also didn’t notice or correct Bednall’s error in the seventh graf (“manmade.com”), but again, inexplicably, switched the placement of the hyperlink.

The Post did, however, notice that Bednall’s line about Smith getting his first Wayne Gretzky cover-autograph in 1973 was incorrect, because — as a commenter noted in an at-reply to Bednall’s tweet (see above) — that would have made Gretzky 12 years old at the time (it’s still incorrect in Bednall’s version of my story). Again, I’m just assuming here, but it stands to reason that Bednall, in his haste to rip off my piece, misread it; I had worded that section oddly but not awkwardly, in my opinion (i.e. “Smith got his first SI subscription in ’73 and got started on the collection nine years later[.]”). Simple math leads the reader to the correct date, 1982.

In the end, the Post gave the second copy of this copy-job in two days Bednall’s byline and included a source line at the bottom citing and leading to Bednall’s unoriginal piece on News.com.au.

Plagiarism: Always Unforgivable

When I found out that these two links existed from my Made Man editor on Friday, May 1, 2015 — almost a full month after I had published my original piece — I tweeted about the issue and posted a few items that mirrored my tweets on my various social platforms. I had assumed in that initial burst of tweets that this had been the work of a “cub reporter.” However, according to Bednall’s LinkedIn profile, which I could view almost in full while signed in to the social media site, he has worked at News Corp. for nearly 10 years. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off. Neither Bednall nor the Post has responded to any of my tweets or other such social posts to date. Additionally, Josh Fruhlinger, my editor’s boss and the senior vp of lifestyle brands at Defy Media, tweeted this show of support: https://twitter.com/fruhlinger/status/595328685336494080 He also has received no response from Bednall on Twitter, whom he called out directly in the tweet.

I thought long and hard about my options regarding this journalistic double-whammy: Some of my friends who responded to my posts on Facebook told me to sue News Corp.; while some said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Take the nypost.com and News.com.au pieces as a compliment.” Many of my friends just “liked” my update as a show of support (I hope). If you were wondering what my thoughts are on the subject of plagiarism, in my opinion, it’s the absolute basest offense in the world of journalism and writing (not to mention academia). It’s intellectual property fraud, not a pat on the back. It’s the single worst crime a journalist can commit, and a lot of them get away with it. They’ll hide behind the guise of the Millennial “aggregation” craze, clearly having no respect for proper citation practices and wiping their hands clean of any responsibility. In recent years, some plagiarists have been outed and properly disposed of. But some have been given a slap on the wrist because of their supposed “high profile” presence in the media world. Either way, plagiarism is callous, careless behavior and stinks of disregard for the entire profession of journalism. It should not be condoned but attacked head on and stymied.

In order to try and make this right, I first cold-emailed a news editor at nypost.com, whom I’d found by searching LinkedIn. That person appeared to be working with sports content on the site, and since I’d contacted someone at the Post before, I knew how emails were supposed to appear. I admit that I had no idea who the Post’s editor of my chop-shopped piece was; it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint who does what at such a large, news-gathering corporation. But I gave it a shot anyway. At the very least, I thought, this person would understand where I was coming from on a journalist-to-journalist level. I mapped out the issue in a long, detailed email (much like this post), discussing Bednall’s lack of proper attribution and the other issues with his “original” and the syndicated version now appearing on nypost.com. I ended by asking the editor to tweak the nypost.com article, putting my Made Man contributor byline on the story, correct the “manmade.com” reference, and source and cite my original piece and “MadeMan.com” at the bottom of their version. I mentioned that if that editor was the wrong person to reach out to, that I’d greatly appreciate that person forwarding my email to the right editor at the Post. I’m assuming here again, but since I didn’t get a bounce-back, the email went through. The editor never replied to me.

After waiting 24 hours for a reply, I reached out to a few well-regarded media sites (that will go unnamed) to see if a journalist on staff would be interested in picking up my story. I’d like to mention that I’ve never done something like this before, and it was an anxiety-inducing process both writing the “pitch” email and clicking “send.” In the end, both sites passed on the story. One editor explained that the Post had done this sort of thing so many times in the past it wasn’t worth following up on (I have yet to verify whether this is true or not).

So here I am, self-publishing my story, hoping that somebody like Poynter.org or another reputable, ethical journalistic website or blog will pick up on this issue and investigate Jai Bednall, News.com.au, and nypost.com for the blatant thievery they perpetrated on my original Made Man story. In the end, what this really comes down to, in my mind, is one question: Should I forgive Jai Bednall for doing this to me? My answer: Absolutely not. Guys like him don’t belong in journalism.

UPDATE: I’ve been diligently visiting the offending News.com.au and nypost.com links daily to see if anything’s changed in my favor. Today, the News.com.au link to Jai Bednall’s copy-job of my piece now leads to a dead link. In its place is this rather enjoyable image now:

I’m going to assume it was taken down in good faith after somebody read my post. (Thank you, Australia.) Unfortunately, the version on nypost.com — with Jai Bednall’s byline, the footer source line, and the mistakes noted in the above post — is still there. Here’s to hoping New York follows Australia’s lead.

UPDATE II: Four months after News.com.au and nypost.com originally published a piece by an Australian journalist, Jai Bednall, who had plagiarized a story I’d written for Made Man, both sites have now taken down the offending post. While the Aussie site took the story down almost immediately after I wrote this self-published piece on LinkedIn, it took nypost.com until today to get the job done. Unfortunately, it didn’t come without more legwork on my part; I had to reach out to yet another random nypost.com editor on LinkedIn, and he finally turned out to be the right guy and made it happen. See the evidence here. Either way, it feels pretty damned good. I guess one thing is clear: If anybody else tries to pull this shit, they know what they’re up against.