The Romenesko Debacle

Wow, what a kerfuffle. Unsurprisingly, when you read only one or two posts--especially from the same source--you get a diluted sense of this situation.

The crux of the issue: Jim Romenesko, longtime blogger and journalist for Poynter, resigned recently due to criticism of mis-attribution. Apparently some of his posts were littered with the original authors' verbatim words, and were not in quotation marks.

One of the editors at Poynter, Julie Moos, is another key player here. Romenesko submitted his resignation to her (and probably whoever else represents her--it sounds like she's the media representative). Moos has come under fire all over Twitter for accepting his resignation; many journalists argue that Romenesko's deeds were not all that dastardly--he credited and linked his sources.

The furor here is huge. People love a good media fight. Who's right, Romenesko or Moos? Which side do you fall on?

Well, in my humble opinion, we're all fighting about the wrong question (at least given what I've learned about this debacle). I read several spinoff articles regarding this debate, and by far the most informative one is here, written by Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry--the woman who Moos credited for finding all those mis-attributions.

Fry makes several points here, including the following (though you should definitely read her whole article):

1. She was preparing to interview Moos about changes she had noticed at Poynter, and sent her questions to Moos in advance. From these questions, Moos went on to write a post that set the debate in motion.

2. Fry noticed problems with attributions with other Poynter staff, too--not just Romenesko.

3. Mis-attributions was only one of Fry's points: her bigger problem was the rise in "over-aggregation" by Poynter staff. When a significant percentage of an author's column is the verbatim quote of another writer--without much original insight--readers won't want to read the original article. Thus, Poynter gets all the traffic.

I'm sure if I kept reading the seemingly endless trail about this story, even more facts would come to light. But even after digging around for just a few minutes, I feel like many reactions--especially from the Twitterverse--are overblown and ill-focused.

This fight has been taken entirely out of context. And someone ended up losing a job over it. What a shame.