Rolling Stone.com: Rewriting other folks’ stories
While checking out coverage of the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger hearing, I noticed a post on RollingStone.com on the proceedings.
You might think Rolling Stone, being a magazine that covers music, might take enough interest in the formation of the most powerful entity the music business has ever seen to tell one of its minions to actually watch the proceedings.
Instead, they just had a writer, Daniel Kreps, rewrite Jim DeRogatis’ coverage from the Chicago Sun-Times.
Now, every blogger links to the work of real reporters, and many quote from it, some too much. And Kreps attributed one fact to the ST high up in his post.
But he didn’t make clear that his entire post was based on someone else’s work. DeRogatis’ story totalled 480 words; the RS one was two-thirds that. The writer didn’t block-quote from the earlier story blogger-style. He just rewrote it, and it looked like it was a real Rolling Stone piece. There was barely a phrase of the total not either directly taken from the Sun-Times’ piece or blandly rewritten:
DeRogatis:
Rapino cited the benefits of Live Nation shows to local economies, claiming that one two-day event last summer at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisc., pumped $5 million into the area. He did not name the artist.
RS:
Rapino and Ticketmaster’s Irving Azoff told the subcommittee that their concerts would help give an economic boost to cities, citing a two-day event Live Nation hosted in East Troy, Wisconsin that generated $5 million in revenues for the city.
DeRogatis:
All of the senators voiced strong skepticism about the merger — including traditional foes Orrin Hatch (R-Utah, and himself an amateur recording artist) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y., and a Bruce Springsteen fan outraged by Ticketmaster’s handling of the upcoming tour) […] The hearing ended with Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) noting that the committee has urged the Justice Department “to examine [the merger] closely” before granting its approval.
RS:
The subcommittee, stacked with senators like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer who were already against the merger, will tell the Department of Justice to “examine the merger closely” before deciding whether to approve it.
It’s not plagiarism; he cited the ST. It’s just lazy, cheap journalism from a place that doesn’t expend enough of its resources on reporting on the industry at the heart of its appeal.
p.s.: DeRogatis, of course, used to be one of the mag’s top music editors. Funny story–ask him to tell you about it.
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Previously in Hitsville:
Live-blogging the House hearings on the Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger
“Re”-selling tickets that don’t yet exist
Liveblogging the Senate’s Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger hearings
Seal & Van Halen in Azoff’s corner!
Updated! 26 questions that should be asked at the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger hearings tomorrow Ticketmaster shareholders sue to stop merger
How Live Nation does business
Will the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger mean higher concert prices?
Another suit against Ticketmaster
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges
6 Comments so far
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To make this big a deal out of a four paragraph story that CLEARLY gives credit to the source in the first paragraph leaves me thinking you’ve either A) got a bone to pick with RS; or B) felt like spending a little part of your day feeling superior kicking around some random blogger/writer who doesn’t live up to your austere standards of how journalism should be conducted.
Seriously, it’s four paragraphs.
Congrats on getting linked to Romenesko, but this is one journalist who comes away thinking the post above says a lot more about your than RS.
who, besides for the people who work there, doesn’t think rolling stone sucks?
More importantly, why is the author of this blog, a man who claims to be named Bill Wyman, directly plagiarizing the name of the former bass player for the actual Rolling Stones (the band, not the mag). I wouldn’t have clicked if I knew this was just some ex-NPR contributor and not an actual Rolling Stone criticising Rolling Stone. Speaking of which, is Mr. Wyman - if that is his real name - equally ruffled about All Things Considered’s serial plagiarism of Wall Street Journal stories? Or do the lofty intellectuals at NPR have a broader “fair use” right to steal others’ work than the crude, boorish capitalists over at Rolling Stone? I agree with Jim Carty - the blogger doth protest too much and haveth too much time on his hands.
@ Jim: I would say the attribution was perfunctory… you had no sense in the rest of the posting it all came from that story. And it wasn’t a lone blogger… RS is now a huge journalistic empire that makes gazillions of dollars. They should hire their own reporters.
@dj: Ironically, RS has gotten appreciably better in terms of reporting the last few years. The magazine is thinner right now, but they’d bulked up the front of the book a lot. And Steve Knopper does a lot of industry news.
@ Fred Fury: I can with some certainty I am the real Bill Wyman. I was an a.m.e. at NPR, not a contributor; for various reasons I don’t think it’s right to comment on what you said about ATC, which wasn’t really my jurisdiction, though I think it’s fair to say that most broadcast news orgs, long before bloggers came along, take a lot of their cues from print operations.
My only real gripe is with that quote he uses without inserting the brackets. That gives the impression that it’s a fresh quote.
Bill,
I’m all for more journalism jobs, and you might have a legitimate grip with RS, but this was the wrong way to pick it it.
Again, four paragraphs. Clear attribution.
Given what you originally wrote, and what you’ve now posted here, it leaves me feeling like you’ve had this issue with RS for a while, and jumped at the first opportunity to take the shot at them.
Even if you had to sort of distort the actual opportunity to get it to fit your gripe, which is unfortunate and somewhat weak, given that you might have a legitimate complaint.