Plagiarism in the workplace

By: Hannah Pickett

One would think that plagiarism is simply applicable in a college or education setting. Surely no one would be dumb enough to think they could get away with plagiarizing as a professional, right? Nope.

At my job, I rely a lot on e-mail to attain statistics. Area coaches e-mail me their stats and one of my writers, an adult, e-mails her stories in to me as well. Monday, the area football coaches sent me their side of the stats. In one coach's message to me, one of my writers, and the Earlham newspaper editor, he wrote: "Here you go. Not much detail, too many touchdowns to get too wordy. As always, change anything that you see fit."

I then realized that he had attached a document named "newspaper article." This raised a red flag to me as an editor since he had attached an article. I opened it, saved it, and set it aside since I was still waiting on the writer's stories. The other red flag that came to mind was the coach's choice of words-as always. To me, this meant that he had been doing it all season.

The next day I received the writer's articles. I opened her football article, and realized that it was identical to what the coach had sent. The writer had spelled out the numbers, but other than that there were no differences between the two.

I was frankly outraged and shocked that a grown woman would think she could get by with this and still get paid for it. I called my publisher and he was very unhappy too. I sent her an e-mail saying that plagiarism is not tolerated in an education setting and is most certainly not tolerated in a journalism setting. Her pay was cut since she did not write the article and she is on probation.

I think plagiarism is sometimes overlooked in a small town newspaper setting. Typically newspaper plagiarism is taken from more reputable, classier sources. In this case, I would have never caught it had it not been for the e-mail the coach sent. Where is the line of plagiarism drawn between providing useful information on a game and actually writing the article? Or is it even considered plagiarism?