A Colorado Newspaper Stole Stories From Its Competition For Years And Credited Them To The AP And Everyone Gets Real Indignant. What’s The Big Deal – As If When It Comes To Credits The Media Is Holier Than Thou

Philip Stone February 28, 2007

As editorial scams go, this one was right up there. The Greeley Tribune in Colorado for years had been stealing, uh, picking up, stories from other Colorado newspapers and crediting them to the Associated Press. Apparently it had been going on for several years before a competitor noticed and complained. The Tribune has apologized and said it won’t happen again.

In practice newspapers that belong to the AP co-operative make all of their stories available to the AP for redistribution. If the Greeley newspaper had asked the AP to process particular stories from other AP members then no doubt the Denver bureau would have complied. All Greeley did was save the AP some work.

Of course the AP doesn’t quite see it that way. George Garties, the AP Denver bureau chief, wouldn’t dream of criticizing an AP member but he did say, “AP protects its brand. We do not condone the use of the AP’s brand by anyone other than AP.”  Oh, forgot to say we picked that quote up from The Coloradoan’s web site.

Apparently the practice began several years ago when one Chris Cobler was Greeley’s editor. He said that he never gave instructions to anyone in his newsroom to just plain steal stories from other papers and attach the AP byline. He said he must have been “misunderstood’”. (In the interests of complete editorial disclosure we took that quote, too, from The Coloradoan).”I wouldn’t call it plagiarism. I’d call it a misunderstanding.” Cobler told his Greeley Tribune.

Now this is the same Chris Cobler who started a new job this week as managing editor of Poynter Online, Poynter being one of America’s most respected schools of journalism. Wonder if they might have him teach any journalism ethics classes while he’s there?

Admittedly, this writer is bemused by this story because he spent 30 years working for international news agencies, and if you really want to talk about how media steal or don’t credit stories then all you have to do is to talk to a “wire” man (or woman).

The first this writer ran into this was starting work with UPI in the early 1970s in London on Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street. Part of the job was to scour all the London nationals looking for UK stories to stea…(uh, pickup usually without crediting the source). It wasn’t difficult after a while to spot UPI stories and pictures being used whole without credit giving yet another reason why the Private Eye nickname for Fleet Street,  “Street of Shame”, sticks. (That’s their logo we have stolen for our picture to illustrate this story)

In those days the word “brand”  was not even on the horizon. It was all about pride. The Fleet Street newspapers, and we’re talking red tops and the quality newspapers, never thought twice about misrepresenting how they came by some of their foreign stories and pictures. Often they would take a news agency story, take off the credit line and head it “By Our Correspondent”. Story was word for word the news agency copy.  Sometimes they would just rewrite the first paragraph and use the credit line, “By our foreign staff”. Or often they would use the entire story and just take off the credit line and letting the story stand without credit.

And it wasn’t just with text; it was just as bad with pictures. More often than not there was no credit line at all, but there were times when the newspaper would actually take credit for the picture and even times when they would give one of their own photographers credit for the picture.

This writer went to journalism school in the US where it was really drilled in to give credit where credit was due. First job the day after college graduation was on the copy desk for the San Jose News (in those days the Mercury (AM) and the News (PM) were Ridder (no Knight) papers.) This writer learned more in three months on that copy desk than in four years at J-School. Again it was drummed into the rookie how important credit lines were. There wasn’t an AP or a UPI story that didn’t have the proper credit and at the times we would combine wire copy we would credit it as Combined Wire Dispatches” or some such.

So showing up in London and seeing how Fleet Street handled credits was a major culture shock. Never did really understand why there was such dishonesty but in London’s competitive newspaper business maybe it was just a plain loss of face to admit they had to run copy that their own bloated staffs had not produced themselves.

News agency contracts have always called for clients to give the proper credit, but it was something the agencies never enforced and many clients ignored. To the news agency, every penny of revenue was important and the first priority was to keep the subscription money coming in.

And it stayed that way until the 1990s when Reuters appointed a new Managing Director, Peter Job. It seems one of the things that really made Job angry – and he did get angry at times – was reading his favorite morning Fleet Street newspaper, or the London evening newspaper, and seeing an exclusive Reuters story, knowing it was an exclusive Reuters story, and yet there was absolutely no credit to Reuters.

Job was one of the very first in the news agency world to really understand the power and financial might of branding – something he picked up while serving on the board of what is now called Diageo, makers of Johnny Walker Scotch among others --  and he started making life miserable for Reuters’ media marketing management in London, insisting that they go to their friendly clients who were paying small fortunes for Reuters services, and demand that they obey their contracts and give the proper credits. Not only that, he insisted that media marketing throughout the world get on that same horse.

Those were not fun days. It was absolutely remarkable how intransient newspapers were. “We have strict policies against giving credits.” “We’ll have to discuss this at higher levels.” “ Are you sure you really want to pursue this?”

Job was serious. When this writer told him that a major European subscriber refused to honor that part of the contract, the contract was worth a lot of money and would be renewable soon and did he really want to pass up that type of money his answer was a non-hesitant “yes”. (Brilliant negotiating by the media marketing manager involved saved the day!)

The truth was that Job was absolutely right. He understood branding before most of us knew what the word meant. In truth the media business is just a very small part of Reuters’ overall revenues, so Reuters was the ideal agency to take that kind of stand. While the agency didn’t want to lose newspaper subscriptions, at least it was in a position that it could afford to do so for principle. Job understood the value and power of having the Reuters name splashed on the front pages of the world’s most prestigious newspapers every day.

So did some of its clients. When this writer began renegotiations with the International Herald Tribune in Paris the editor, then a former AP man,  started by very seriously asking how much Reuters was willing to pay the IHT for publishing its stories and pictures on what he called, “our front page news billboard distributed around the world.” And he was absolutely serious. He understood the value of that branding. (Again, brilliant negotiating by the media manager saved that day, but it was tough!)

Through the years Reuters, and other agencies who followed what Reuters was doing with great interest and were perfectly willing to let it be in the forefront, eventually got on the same bandwagon, and the media in general started coming around to giving credit where credit was due, although by no means is it perfect even today.

One of the great branding breakthroughs came in Reuters’ video deal with CNN. It was written into the contract that whenever CNN’s international services used more than a few seconds of Reuters Television video that they had to put a Reuters credit on the screen. You’ll see that is still the case on CNNI today, for Reuters and other agencies.

Television was a hard nut to crack. The likes of the BBC and ITN in the UK, for instance, absolutely refused to give video credits. “We pay for your service, not to give you credit” one senior ITN official said at the time. (Interestingly, Mark Wood, Reuters’ former editor-in-chief and once global head of media marketing is now ITN’s chairman – wonder whether that policy is still in place?)

The situation got to the point that one day, when this writer was Reuters Television commercial director, we had the great idea of burning into some very exclusive footage the Reuters logo in the upper left corner. This was footage neither the BBC nor ITN could afford to pass up even though they had a policy of not using video that contained branding.

Sure enough that night both networks used the footage and, you know what, they both digitally removed that Reuters logo.

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