Wide Area News
Walk away, Renee
by Russell Brown
What happened when a green journalist didn’t ’fess up to copying another writer’s work.
Renee Kiriona will shudder to see her name once again in the body of a story and not in the byline at the top. But the young New Zealand Herald reporter’s recent act of plagiarism has, in its way, done the media a service by drawing out discussion of an issue that is never talked about till it actually happens.
The story, if you haven’t already caught up with it, is this: 25-year-old Kiriona, who had been with the Herald less than a year, was asked to write a feature profile of former rugby league star Tawera Nikau, who has battled back from the loss of a leg in a motorcycle accident, for the Weekend Herald’s Canvas magazine.
She met with Nikau, in Huntly, where he lives, but got what seems to have been an unsatisfactory interview. When she tried again to meet Nikau, he declined and suggested that instead she look on the Internet for information about him.
She did, and found his profile page on the website of Speakers New Zealand, which contained a clumsy cut-and-paste of two stories about Nikau. The first three paragraphs were a news story attributed to the Press. Then below a line reading “In March 2004, the following article appeared”, was a profile of Nikau written by Lester Thorley for the Waikato Times.
Kiriona took the Times story, put a few paragraphs of her own on the top and submitted it to Canvas. She later secured another interview and wrote a second version that still included some of Thorley’s writing, but much more of her own – but failed to tell her editor, Carroll du Chateau, what she had done.
While Kiriona was away from the office, du Chateau edited together the two versions of her story – including whole paragraphs written by Thorley. Kiriona saw the combined version on her return and knew she had a problem, but, according to a later story in the Herald, didn’t want to be “the cause of any more bother” by confessing her actions to her editor.
Canvas’ cover story was published – and its origins were soon picked up. The Times and the Herald are owned by rival publishing companies, Fairfax and APN, and, inevitably, the affair escalated.
Back in April, the Herald had published a story headed “It’s not Truth, it’s the Sunday News”, noting that the ABC’s Media Watch programme in Australia had caught Fairfax’s New Zealand tabloid the Sunday News re-using sports stories from Australian papers (including the Sunday Telegraph, which is not owned by Fairfax), under fictitious bylines. Although Sunday News editor Clive Nelson was unapologetic, Fairfax New Zealand’s chief operating officer, Peter O’Hara, declined to discuss what the Herald’s story described as “the ethics of fake bylines”.
So now it was the Herald’s turn. “The Waikato Times writes great stories – just ask the New Zealand Herald,” chirped a Times story on the Wednesday, after the Herald ran a brief apology. Kiriona had by then confessed and received a warning from her editor that she would lose her job if it happened again. The photographer on the story, Glenn Jaffrey, was also spoken to.
Within days, both the Herald and Fairfax’s Sunday Star-Times had run backgrounders, in which former magazine editors Finlay Macdonald and Warwick Roger expressed sympathy for du Chateau, who, like any editor, could only trust in her writer to play fair. (It might, on the other hand, be fair to speculate about the editorial environment that saw an inexperienced writer go so far out on a limb.)
Roger was on the receiving end of one of the more notorious acts of plagiarism as editor of Metro, when a winning short story in a competition run by the magazine turned out to be a chapter from a Martin Amis book. The Star-Times quoted him as declaring plagiarism to be an “immoral act”. He subsequently suggested in a radio interview that Kiriona had only kept her job because she was a young Maori woman, whereas a white male would have been sent packing.
Yet, in 1999, Roger was caught by AdMedia magazine using paragraphs from Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm, in such a way that a reader would reasonably have thought that they were his own words, in a North & South story that went on to win a Qantas Media Award. He presumably would bristle at the suggestion that he only kept his job because his wife was the editor.
In 1977, Roger, then a reporter for the Dominion, was censured by the Press Council for taking without permission quotes recorded by film-maker Richard Turner for a documentary on the Black Power gang, and using them in two major crime stories for the paper. In its decision, the council said that Roger agreed that “he and/or the Dominion failed to make adequate acknowledgement that a very large part of those two articles (including all the direct quotations) consisted of the work of Richard Turner”.
Roger has been a notable servant of New Zealand journalism, but in this instance he has looked not only uncharitable, but also a hypocrite.
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