Boria Majumdar
I have so far stayed away from writing about this issue. But now, I think it’s time. Every passing day, this trend is becoming more and more prominent. People lifting interviews and passing them off as their own without giving credit. Ethics? Professionalism? Basic sense of professional integrity?
We at RevSportz have time and again called some of these people out. While some have apologised, others have disappeared. Sometimes, we have let things pass because we are so used to it. Such acts weren’t right. We should have called such offenders out. And not let them be.
It happened again last night. OneCricket, a platform which aggregates news and passes stories off as their own, lifted my interview with Bharat Arun and even added their own byline! Aashay Chopade, the one with this byline, should ask himself where this interview came from. Did he actually do it? Has he spoken to Bharat? The answer is obviously that he did not. He has stolen it, and passed it off as his own. Better still, Sports Tak, an organisation I was earlier associated with, took it from OneCricket and went ahead and attributed the interview to them!
To be honest, I am now used to this. Almost all of my interviews are plagiarised. While some of my colleagues like Subhayan Chakraborty tweeted against this practice, the truth is the situation is almost beyond repair.
Where it becomes nastier is when things are stolen from younger journalists. Just a few days ago, one of our reporters Gargi Raut broke a story on the LSG speedster Mayank Yadav. Gargi is a young reporter and was understandably elated when her story was picked up by many in the media. And that’s when it came to light that Inside Sport, a platform of some repute, had plagiarised the story and carried it as their own. The story had been picked up by many others, and no credit was given.
Gargi’s case isn’t an aberration. Subhayan too has been on the receiving end on a number of occasions. The truth is this is becoming routine. News aggregators, who don’t wish to work hard to get news or aren’t capable of it, just wait on social media to use someone else’s exclusive as their own. And with some of them having cobbled together reasonable followings despite not even one original story, this has turned into a convenient practice of sorts.
Over the next few days, RevSportz will air exclusive interviews with India spinner Kuldeep Yadav, all-rounder Shardul Thakur, legendary spinner Ravichandran Ashwin and former Australian skipper Michael Clarke. Each of these interviews are in-depth conversations setting up the England series. It can be said with certainty that each of these interviews will be plagiarised. Many will claim them as their own and chisel out multiple news copies from each one. Some will go a step further, and make quote cards! These will contain relevant news headlines, but no attribution.
It isn’t easy to break news or put out exclusives. The least those in the fraternity can do is respect that and conduct themselves ethically. With so much information out there, it is not difficult to identity the platforms that are repeat offenders indulging in continuous malpractice. In fact, there should be some form of copyright strike to take them down!