Attention, Out Of Work Journalists!

from the new-career-path dept

The newspaper business is in the can, papers are closing left and right, and lots of others are laying off staffers. But perhaps some of those who have their newspaper gigs can get in on a hot growth industry: ghostwriting Twitter messages for celebrities. Even better if you're a laid-off copy editor who wrote headlines -- all the better to deal with the 140-character limit as you seek to convey the personality of a celebrity who's too lazy/incompetent/uninterested to do it themselves, while making their fans feel really special because they're enjoying what they think is a small personal connection. Shaquille O'Neal, who writes his own tweets, sums it up pretty well: "It's 140 characters. It's so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you."

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Forget Journalist Plagiarism, How About Journalists Hiring Others To Ghost Write For Them?

from the this-must-be-the-new-journalism dept

These days, journalistic plagiarism scandals are old hat. Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass... been there, done that. So, now, thanks to Romenesko we get news of a new type of journalism scandal. A columnist who's been accused of hiring a ghost writer to write his columns. Apparently that ghost writer came forward, asking for bylines to be changed to include his name (oops). Still, is this really that bad?

It reminds me of stories from a few years back during the dot com boom when there was some concern about offshoring work to India. Some people jokingly claimed that they hired some folks in India to do their own jobs for them, and were able to make a good living without having to do much work, other than reviewing the work of others. It's not clear if this ever really happened, but would it really be that ridiculous if it did? Yes, there's the moral question of whether or not it was right for this guy to present the work of someone else as his own, but that happens every day. Almost every political speech is written by someone else -- yet no one worries about the ethics there. Books are ghost written all the time. Hell, I've been both asked to ghost write a book for someone else and had someone offer to ghost write a book for me (in the same week, no less!). So, is this really such a big scandal?

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