Plagiarism is journalism’s sin of sins, but not its crime of crimes. In court it’s a copyright violation, if that. Wendell Hutson is steaming mad because somebody else signed his work. Hutson’s gunning for legal satisfaction, but don’t count on him getting any.
In the May 20, 2002, Illinois Real Estate Journal he found a roundup of Illinois business park developments. The segment labeled “Alton” began: “Twenty years after an Alton manufacturing plant closed its doors, the downtown site is now being developed into a potential 1 million square foot mixed-use business park with the potential for 1 million square feet.”
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Kramer might be right. Hutson wrote the original piece as a salaried employee, which means the copyright presumably belongs to the company. “How can you plagiarize something you own the rights to?” Kramer wants to know. “Don’t all newspapers use archival information?” He concedes that there should have been a note telling readers the survey was compiled from old IREJ stories, but if there wasn’t, so what? “At the last minute in the production process, things slip through the cracks. I don’t think we did anything wrong.”
As for Sutton, his conscience is clear. “I personally edited and wrote some of the information in the article,” he says. “I know I added that lead.”
Is the public defrauded when it reads a Wendell Hutson story under the impression it’s a Brian Sutton story? Hutson saw a lawyer who came up with a new theory.
News Bites
“In the last couple of months, he’s added more detail to this account,” the magazine went on. “Now, as Bush tells it in his speeches, he made the promise ‘in Chicago.’ He says he was asked if he would ever run a deficit by ‘a reporter,’ although at various points he has identified the questioner as ‘a fellow,’ ‘some guy,’ ‘they,’ ‘somebody,’ and ‘the guy.’”
