After finding The Telegraph published my words last week without correct (and worse, with improper) attribution, I was both pleased and pissed. I was flattered that a big time newspaper like the Telegraph saw fit to print my words, but pretty unhappy that they more or less stole them. (Short summary: I wrote a story for the February issue of Wired. On June 10, several news outlets published a paragraph from that story, slightly altered, and attributed it to another source. The online news site INDenver cites the Telegraph as the source.)
On Friday, I wrote several of the Telegraph's published email addresses, and contacted it via the online submission form. I was hoping I would hear back from Telegraph over the weekend. It bothered me all day on both Saturday and Sunday. When I still had heard nothing by 9 am Pacific Time today, I tried sending messages via Twitter, both completely openly and less so.
The entire incident has me kind of flummoxed. On the one hand, it seems like just a sloppy mistake. But then how would text from one, completely unrelated, story make its way into another published months afterward? And why was it slightly altered? All this was made the more maddening in that it wasn't a bylined story and the Telegraph gives no good way to contact them.
The only thing I've been sure of from the giddyup, when a Wired reader first alerted me by email, is that those words were mine. The text in question was pretty distinctive. It's one of those rare pleasing paragraphs that passed all the way from first draft to publication without changing very much. I created it. I take pride in it. My words. And words are my livelihood.
I wanted to see how bastardized it had become. And the answer is quite a bit; I'm disturbed by how many sites already publish my words attributed solely to Israel Hyman--the source of the story. (I reached Hyman, who says he never said anything like that.)
But also there, in the results for "spendy bicycle" and Hyman, I found this story from CNET, dated June 8th, in an article by Elinor Mills on the Twitturglary. And I think it may hold the answer as to what happened.
The real-time aspect to mobile uploads makes this situation even more risky and location-aware technology seems like it would be a great tool for spies of all kinds. In this excellent article in Wired, Mathew Honan records his experience being a social geoapps guinea pig.
"Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town?" he writes. "Because the card in my camera automatically added location data to my photos, anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flatscreen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place--and with a few more you could get black gloves and a lock pick delivered to your home."
Hey. That's the exact text in question.
The Telegraph story changes "he writes" to "he said." Otherwise it's the same--critically both omit the same sentence that appears in my original article. In the original, where the he says/he writes appears, my text reads "It wasn't just leaving my wife home alone that concerned me."
It seems very unlikely that, within forty-eight hours, two separate publications would independently edit my text in nearly the same way, four-plus months after it originally appeared. I've tried not to speculate about what happened, but after reading the CNET story it seems pretty obvious.
So this is my hunch: A writer or editor at The Telegraph sees a story on CNET, and copies large parts of it for The Telegraph's own use, but changes it slightly. I can't know what the motivation or intent was, but I'm pretty sure that's the how. CNET may even have a content sharing or syndication arrangement with the Telegraph. (Which wouldn't be surprising, CNET seems to be in every other paper in the world.) But whether it was an accident, intentional copying, or just a grand coincidence the bottom line is the same.
The bottom line is: Someone in an editorial capacity at the Telegraph swiped my words.
A lot of people have asked me: Why don't you just let Wired deal with this? It's a good question. Some of it is just timing. I have talked to them about it, and even received some guidance, but I only discovered it late in the day Friday. Key people who need to be involved were then and still are in New York for the Wired Disruptive by Design conference. In the meantime I'm trying to see what can be done about it before the mistake proliferates across the Web even more. Because it ultimately comes down to wanting to protect my intellectual property.
My words. You put them in somebody else's mouth. In doing that, you stole them from me.
