You might think, from this article, that there is a real issue about Rick Perlstein’s scholarship. But you would be wrong, and what a pity that Alter, just hired, would debut so awkwardly.
Alexandra, reporting is not collecting quotes from both “sides” of a story, especially when one side is a historian with a reputation and a long record and the other “side” is a hack and a flack. See, you can actually use your Columbia J-School training about what plagiarism is, not to mention your special expertise covering the publishing industry, to discern the facts, and tell us what they are, and you should, and you didn’t.
You can also figure out that someone like Craig Shirley is not the real goods with fairly rudimentary research skills. Even I could figure that out, and from the second sentence on his Wikipedia page:
He is best known as “one of the most esteemed Ronald Reagan biographers“.[1]
See the little [1]? it points, in support of the assertion, to a piece of Reagan hagiography, by someone I never heard of, on Breitbart. Breitbart. The Wikipedia page sounds as though it was written by Shirley or his intern, but it doesn’t matter: Wikipedia is open source, and if Shirley is allowing that to remain on his page, he has a concept of esteemed, and of evidence therefor, that waves red flags all over the place. Having a keyboard and a fax machine doesn’t make someone a “side”.
Please go down the hall to the climate change desk and get a quick hit of why “he said, she said” is not journalism, and also get the phone number of the advertising department to pass on to people who try to use you as a free mouthpiece.
JamesWimberley says
One of the odder criticisms of Perlstein is using online notes. This is partly money-saving by publishers, and just part of the economic crisis of print. But online references also expand what an author can provide in the way of supplementary material. Thomas Piketty's magnum opus Capital in the XXIst Century, 970 pages in French, has not only endnotes and bibliography online, but massive statistical tables and methodological discussions. You can download the whole apparatus : in one zip file, it's 13 MB, comparable to the size of the book. Good journalists today, like Paul Krugman or George Monbiot, provide hyperlinks to sources in the online versions of their columns. We bloggers here always supply hyperlinks in our posts, it's no more than standard good practice. From time to time, I supply a spreadsheet online to back up a chart.
“The concern for me is that the URLs won’t live forever," Alter quotes a guy at Houghton Miflin. Well, they - the URLs created by scholarly publishers and newspapers - should live forever, or as long as a book does. The BBC aims at permanence of URLs, and most of their stuff is ephemera. If domains are changed, you should leave a pointer to the new one. There's also the Wayback Machine.
Barry_D says
Michael, thanks for hitting this, and more for pointing out that a journalist can't honestly dodge the question of what plagiarism is. They can't plead ignorance here.