Bon's Mots

Last month, I wrote a press re­lease for a fundraiser a friend of mine is or­ga­niz­ing, which will take place on January 19. As the date of the event nears, we’ve been try­ing to get the word out through me­dia pitches, so­cial net­work­ing sites and word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing. Any ex­po­sure or me­dia at­ten­tion is more than welcome.

Today, a free­lance jour­nal­ist based in Toronto posted the press re­lease on his blog and on DigitalJournal​.com. This was great news to my friend, and I was quite pleased, but herein lies the rub – while it was posted ver­ba­tim, it was not sourced or cred­ited to any­one. Furthermore, my con­tact in­for­ma­tion at the bot­tom of the re­lease was re­moved. With his by­line, it looked as though it was his post/article.

I didn’t know what to think. This isn’t about me get­ting at­ten­tion; as a pro­fes­sional com­mu­ni­ca­tor, I don’t ex­pect per­sonal ac­co­lades and recog­ni­tion for my work – any at­ten­tion should be di­rected at the or­ga­ni­za­tion I’m work­ing for. But in my opin­ion, a sim­ple no­ta­tion about the source (my friend’s com­edy troupe, StandUp For Your Sisters), or an ar­ti­cle based on the re­lease, would have been the right thing to do.

The re­leases I’ve is­sued for the Ontario Dental Association have ei­ther been reprinted and cred­ited to the or­ga­ni­za­tion, or cited by re­porters as a source of in­for­ma­tion for their ar­ti­cles or broad­casts. This sit­u­a­tion was en­tirely new to me. So I sought ad­vice from friends and col­leagues: Is this normal?

Most agreed that yes, it was (un­for­tu­nately) nor­mal and le­gal, al­beit very un­pro­fes­sional and am­a­teur­ish. One friend told me I was lucky to have the re­lease posted by a jour­nal­ist, be­cause it lends more cred­i­bil­ity (as op­posed to hav­ing a re­lease posted by me or my friend). He added that I should be happy it was posted ver­ba­tim be­cause at least the mes­sage was not dis­torted. “Welcome to the state of jour­nal­ism in 2010,” he quipped.

I sup­pose I should be glad about the cov­er­age — the event will hope­fully re­ceive more ex­po­sure, and the mes­sage was, in­deed, in­tact. Yet some­thing about the whole thing smacks of lazi­ness and a lit­tle dis­re­spect. It also got me think­ing — what’s stop­ping some­one — any­one — from tak­ing a press re­lease and post­ing it on­line as their own? Should we al­low our ma­te­r­ial to be ap­pro­pri­ated as some­one else’s work and just be grate­ful we’re get­ting the attention?

To me, there is a fine line be­tween re­port­ing and pla­gia­rism, and I’m still un­sure if it’s been crossed in this case. But it does feels like it has been broached.

Does this re­ally con­sti­tute jour­nal­ism in the 21^st century?