For sometime now, The Standard has been raising concern about the manner its news articles have been reviewed on local radios; some of which either don’t give credit to the paper or worse, mistranslate the stories.
Following personal interventions and perhaps a recent public debate about the work of the radios, there seems to be a marked improvement in this area.
However, a similar trend has emerged in the international front with many online papers, websites and bloggers habitually feeding from The Standard’s well-researched and hard-hitting scoops, only to parade them as their own original stories.
A case in point is our recent scoop on the list of former President Jammeh’s frozen assets; a story which was exclusively broken in by The Standard but widely circulated by many without the courtesy or decency of crediting the source. Some even claimed that it was an open press release from the government when actually only The Standard was privy to it.
In fact, to ensure that we can recognise and point any plagiarism of our report, we deliberately and secretly watermarked the list by putting ‘sic’ at some points that we believed didn’t add up and the unsuspecting plagiarists duly fell into our trap and reproduced everything and presented them as their own hard work. We read their plagiarized works with hilarious laughter knowing full well it was our original work they are sharing without giving us credit.
However, the matter is not a laughing one. Decency and ethics of the job dictate that we give credit where due and never present other people’s work as ours. We hope that our esteem colleagues in the Diaspora will continue to feed from us but will now do the right thing by crediting us. We always give credit to any medium we pick a story from and we DEMAND the same!
