Juliet Dobson: Open journalism and social media
24 Sep, 12 | by BMJ Group
The Guardian is well known for being at the forefront of journalism and for pushing forward ever more innovative ways of covering the news. A talk at King’s Place on Friday 14 September looked at how journalism is changing and how social media, particularly Twitter, are changing the way news is reported and read.
The talk was by Dan Roberts, national editor, Guardian. He opened the discussion by looking back to his first job at a local paper. I loved his description of working in an office that was above the printing presses. He said you could feel the hum and vibrations of the presses in the office as the papers were printed. It was a very industrial process and this was reflected in the way journalists worked. Journalists wrote and readers consumed. The papers were printed and then delivered in lorries all around the country. But now, in the 21st century, this producer-consumer balance has shifted as smartphones have given everyone the ability to gather information and publish it. more…
I must begin by making clear that I think the BMJ magnificent, much improved from when I was the editor. I particularly applaud the introduction of indepth investigative journalism. I’m also extremely grateful to the journal for publishing my blogs, some of which seem to push close to the edge of sanity. But I want to reflect on the question of whether the journal is too sensitive about the threat of a libel action. The question arises because the journal wants to change a blog I’ve written for fear of libel, and I think that the editors are being overcautious. 
In Washington DC last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt defended the company’s business practices when he appeared before a Senate antitrust panel. Down the road at Georgetown University the following day, his colleague Darcy Dapra was doing a similar thing to an audience of scholarly publishers.
I spent Friday afternoon at three sessions on The Spoken Word at King’s Place, London.
Last Wednesday I joined the BMJ as the Roger Robinson editorial registrar. This is my first despatch from the frontline of medical publishing.
Gross plagiarism is easy to spot and most people agree it’s wrong, so it’s relatively easy to deal with. But while stealing somebody else’s paper and pretending it’s your own is obvious misconduct, it’s surprisingly hard to define exactly what plagiarism is, especially for more minor offences. It would be helpful if we could agree a definition of plagiarism (or a classification of different types) so that editors (and teachers) could decide how they should handle it/them. Editors now have access to powerful text-matching software (such as CrossCheck or even a simple Google™ search). It’s now easy to discover the percentage of text in one document that matches text in another (or several others). But it’s much more difficult to know what those numbers mean. In fact, one editor I know says that the numbers are meaningless (although she admits that the tools are helpful for flagging up possible problems and then looking for large matches). 
