Last week, in light of the hot water Baltimore Sun columnist Michael Olesker has found himself in, David Simon at the Baltimore City Paper wondered whether all journalists are plagiarists due to the recycling and regurgitation of stories written by other reporters.

He brings up a good question: at what point is a writer committing plagiarism, and at what point is he using already-known information in his own words? Is it a matter of mixing up ones words a standard amount?

I did not go to journalism school, nor have I ever passed myself off as a reporter. But I do know some reporters. I asked Tom Zoellner, an mb instructor, reporter and author of the book The Heartless Stone, what his thoughts were on the line between sharing and stealing, and how writers straddle it:

more after the break

This is a major gray area. Much of the material that runs inside any newspaper's national or metro section is an update of a ongoing story --President Bush again defends domestic spying, the Board of Commissioners is debating a property tax increase, lawyers for Robert Blake argued that he could not have killed his ex-wife, etc. -- and those stories demand at least a paragraph of background somewhere recapping the history behind the "news" at the top of the story for those just joining us. Those explainers get awfully stale over time and it becomes quite hard to keep rephrasing it in different ways. If you're a beat reporter following an unfolding story, you're in constant danger of plagiarizing *yourself* more than anybody. I always avoided the "cut-and-paste" of my own background grafs and tried to just sing the song in a different note every time, which was a bit of a silly exercise in retrospect, but it helped me sleep better at night.

I suppose if 500 reporters (or monkeys) pounded on their typewriters for the length of a trial or a Washington scandal, one of them is going to come up with a near-exact duplicate of somebody else's background graf. But this seems to me to be an extreme misdemeanor variety of "plagiarism" -- if you can even call it that -- deserving of a talking-to at most, as long as the language was uncreative and confined to a boilerplate clause or a sentence. You really need to see blatant ripoffs, or a pattern of recurring vibrant language, to call it a firing offense. Intent is everything here. Nobody is going to risk their careers for a dull sentence after the jump that says: "Prosecutors have alleged that Jones killed his wife after becoming despondent over his gambling losses" and editors should understand that this type of thing is in some ways inevitable over time because there are only so many words you can chose from to describe a routine government process.