On March 27, 2024, the Commission on Journalistic Ethics received a complaint from the online media outlet Kyivvlada against a number of media outlets using their materials and regularly republishing them without references to original materials, which would potentially constitute plagiarism.
One of the outlets, Pohliad, agreed to cooperate with Kyivvlada using mediation provided by the Commission on Journalistic Ethics. In its response to the Commission’s request regarding Kyivvlada’s complaint, the outlet admitted that resharing materials constituted a violation of internal editorial policies of the media.
On April 23, 2024, Pohliad reported they taught their staff about ethics of citations and the rules of legitimate rewriting with a designated editor. The outlet also organized an online training about journalists’ work with open data in the Prozorro system and creation of original materials to improve their qualifications.
The Commission welcomes the newsroom’s steps to prevent future violations and improve the qualifications of its own employees.
Plagiarism is not only a violation of journalistic ethics standards, but also a serious threat to the integrity of competition in the media market. Countering it requires serious steps by players at the media market, who should not distort the idea of their work among the audience, pretending to be the authors of somebody else’s materials.
As a reminder, the following should be done to avoid plagiarism:
- when sharing materials from other media outlets, a link to the original material should be provided;
- when creatively rewriting a material, its source of origin should still be indicated so that a consumer of information could fact-check it;
- if the reference material is a copy or a rewrite of another material, the original source should be identified and indicated;
- if new elements are added to a material created based on another material, the obligation to reference the original source of the shared or rewritten text remains;
- there should be editorial policies, rules, or guidelines regarding republishing materials in newsrooms, and these rules should be closely followed.
We remind you that the Commission on Journalistic Ethics announced a competition for mentor support in the development of newsroom rules.
In addition, the Commission regularly acts as a mediator in disputes between complainants and newsrooms — for instance, the National Bank of Ukraine and the online outlet Obozrevatel recently settled a dispute through mediation aided by the Commission’s efforts.