Article published July 03, 2009
Plagiarism at weekly used as teaching tool
Professor reports columnist to paper
Mary Linehan, a professor at the University of Toledo, contacted the Toledo Free Press about a plagiarized fitness column. Schwartz
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THE BLADE/DAVE ZAPOTOSKY
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BLADE STAFF
Mary Linehan, an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo, thought she'd stumbled upon an interesting point of research for her class.
She had no idea, though, that what began as an illustration to her students about how to properly cite information in their papers could result in a threat to her job.
Ms. Linehan said she stresses the importance of attribution in her history classes, specifically when students write about history and use other sources, and typically includes a plagiarism example in her class to show how easy it is to catch and the consequences, she said.
This year, she found a local example in the Toledo Free Press, a free weekly publication, and she happened to know the author - Gregg Schwartz, the owner of the Sylvania-based American Mobile Fitness, who until recently wrote a monthly column focused on fitness for the weekly.
The UT associate professor was a former client of Mr. Schwartz's business and said she was familiar with his writing style, helping him to fix grammar mistakes and rework the writing on his company's Web site.
She told The Blade she was reading one of his Free Press columns and thought "he doesn't write like this," so she copied phrases from the column into Google and found an American Council on Exercise article that was almost word for word the same as the Schwartz column."I thought, this is the local newspaper, and won't this get the attention of the students?" she said.
Her next step was to inform the Free Press about her findings.
She wrote a letter to Tom Pounds, the weekly's publisher and president, dated April 23, and included at least a half-dozen examples from a one-year span of Mr. Schwartz's work highlighting portions of his columns that were lifted without attributions from other publications.
Most of the Schwartz articles contained information from the American Council on Exercise, which notes on the bottom of its news releases that the information "may be reprinted with proper credit given to the American Council on Exercise."
Mr. Schwartz, who wrote columns for the paper from 2007 to as recently as April, did not include that credit.
"It was not just a sentence, but the whole thing," Ms. Linehan said.
Messages left by The Blade for Mr. Schwartz at his business and e-mails were not returned.
Ms. Linehan said she did not receive a reply to her letter to Mr. Pounds and it wasn't published in the Free Press with other letters to the editor. She said Mr. Schwartz took her letter to former UT board of trustees Chairman Rick Stansley in an effort to get her disciplined.
"What really makes some furious and angry and outraged and makes me feel threatened as an individual is that the Free Press would give Gregg my letter without bothering to answer it and send him on his way to hassle me," she said.
Mr. Stansley confirmed that Mr. Schwartz, who was formerly his personal trainer, approached him with the letter and that he is required to look into allegations of wrongdoing.
But Mr. Stansley said a quick read of the letter and an informal conversation with the head of UT's human resources department showed that Ms. Linehan wrote the letter on behalf of her class and she had done nothing wrong.
Mr. Pounds did not return calls from The Blade seeking comment, and Michael Miller, editor-in-chief of the weekly, refused to answer specific questions about the allegations of plagiarism from The Blade, but released the following statement:
"When we discovered some of Gregg Schwartz's advertorial submissions contained content he paid for through a professional service, we immediately dropped him as a contributor. As Schwartz is a small businessman, not a public figure dealing with news or political events, the separation was handled in-house."
An advertorial is a blending of editorial and advertising content. However, the Schwartz columns were not labeled as advertisements in the weekly publication.
What's clear is that the Free Press has not informed its readers about the plagiarism the UT associate professor brought to its attention.
And Mr. Miller has revealed publicly that he was once a client of Mr. Schwartz, writing in a September, 2007, column that he was trying to get in shape and that effort included strength training with Mr. Schwartz.
This is the fourth Free Press columnist caught plagiarizing the works of others.
Former Lucas County Commissioner Maggie Thurber and financial adviser and former radio host Troy Neff had their columns pulled from the paper for plagiarism.
And a former University of Toledo dean failed to use quotes to distinguish sources' comments from his own.
A month after Ms. Linehan sent the letter to the Toledo Free Press, Mr. Miller devoted a column to Ms. Thurber's plagiarizing of several lines of a Memorial Day column.
It read, in part: "I am not a legal expert on plagiarism, but at this publication, I have the responsibility of defining these matters. Thurber failed to cite a source, and in the parameters I have set, that's a one-strike offense. Mistake, oversight or sloppiness, it is a disservice to readers and will not be tolerated. Resignation accepted."
The column also noted that the publication was running every submission through a Web site filter "designed to spot strings of text that already exist."
Robert Stewart, a journalism professor at Ohio University for more than 20 years, said more important than how many times plagiarism happens at a publication is what the publication does about it.
The most important question is, can the reader assume the content is written by the person whose byline is at the top.
"Can the reader be assured this is indeed their original idea or original writing, and if they can't be sure of that, can they be sure of anything that's in the publication?" he asked.
It's the publication's responsibility to assure the readers that is the case, even if it includes content not from trained journalists, he said.
"If you're relying on someone who hasn't been trained in this and they don't necessarily understand what the ground rules of industry are, it would behoove you as a publication to make sure you explain," Mr. Stewart said.
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., said plagiarism is a problem by both citizen contributors and trained journalists and occurs in both columns and news articles.
And occurrences of it are ultimately an editor's issue and a leadership issue in the newsroom, she said.
"Your standards have to be very clear. That means they have to be written down and they need to be repeated often," Ms. McBride said.
While there may be no legal obligation to do so, Mr. Stewart and Ms. McBride said, a paper should tell its readers when plagiarism happens.
The first step is to check all the writer's other work to identify how big the problem is, Ms. McBride said. Then the writer is disciplined - either fired or something almost equally severe.
"Then you tell your audience what is going on," she said, adding that it's best to address it on the page that it happened.
For Ms. Linehan, she is glad the semester ended before she had to tell her class that the Free Press didn't respond to her letter.
She's leaving UT at the end of the month to move to Texas, where she'll become chairman of the history department at the University of Texas in Tyler, but she plans to use the experience as a teaching tool in the future. "What I intend to do is give my students the articles and ask them to determine if they are plagiarized or not," she said. "Then I plan to tell them how the Free Press responded and discuss the ethics of that."
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