Reusing old articles without admitting it, as the new young New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer did, is something you really shouldn’t do. You know you shouldn’t do it because it fails to pass a very simple test. As a writer for the website Gawker put it (the link is in the article linked to above),
A good rule of thumb for writers who are concerned about whether they’re reusing too much old material is to simply ask themselves, “Would my editor be okay if I told him how much of this is reused?” The answer will be “no,” so then you can stop reusing things, you lazy bum. In the event that the answer is “yes,” you probably work somewhere near the bottom of the media barrel, like at an internet blog. Sorry.
“Could I get away with this if I told the truth?” is a good question for other enterprises than journalism.
Interesting to me was the response of many of the writers and blog commenters to the story: their flat out simple black-and-white you-just-don’t-do-that moralism. It’s a note you don’t often hear when someone’s sins are discussed on such websites (unless those sins are racism, homophobia, sexism, fundamentalism, conservatism, etc.). There are a number of clueless defenders among the commenters, but all in all, the responses are cheering.
Here’s a slightly newer and more damning story, for those who are interested in Lehrer’s career.
June 21st, 2012 | 9:51 am
I have read How We Decide and Imagine, and I found them both very intelligently written, informative, and entertaining. It is disappointing to hear that Johah Lehrer recycled old writings in his New Yorker blog, and it is very appropriate that he is in the doghouse for it. However, but I don’t believe Lehrer committed a “crime” or that the information is “damning.” By definition, there is no such thing as “self-plagiarism.” Passing off your old work as new work without acknowledging it is indefensible, but it is hardly comparable to passing off someone else’s work as your own. You can’t steal from yourself.
June 21st, 2012 | 9:55 am
We expect writers not to repeat themselves, but we apply different rules to those who speak in public. I think I remember Fr Neuhaus recalling advice he received from Abraham Joshua Heschel.
It was early in Richard Neuhaus’s career, and he was beginning to get public attention. He needed to give a speech in, let’s say St Louis, and he did not have time to prepare; he did have, however, a speech that had been well-received in, oh, San Francisco. Could he in good conscience re-use the earlier speech?
Rabbi Heschel told him not to worry that the people in St Louis knew what he had said in San Francisco.
June 21st, 2012 | 10:25 am
David Nickol: I didn’t say passing off old work as new was comparable to plagiarism. (Of course they’re *comparable*, but you mean “close to equivalent.”) But if you’ll read the second link to which you’re reacting, it reports that he did the latter as well.
On a different matter, by definition there *might* be such a thing as “self-plagiarism.” I don’t like the term, but it depends on your definition and whether you emphasize the taking from another or the lack of proper attribution. We don’t have another term for reusing your own material without telling your reader when you should, so people use “self-plagiarism.”
June 21st, 2012 | 1:02 pm
On a different matter, by definition there *might* be such a thing as “self-plagiarism.”
The appropriate term would be fraud.
That’s what we call it when someone passes something off as what it is not, and/or deliberately and misleadingly fails to disclose relevant information.
And it’s not just whether the editor would mind, but also the reader – because while it’s the editor being defrauded (being sold a reprint and being led to believe it’s first rights), but the reader is ultimately the one being lied to. Would the reader care if they knew the truth?
I’m guessing the answer to that question is probably linked into the question, “why didn’t the blogger simply quote his old earlier self honestly?”
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