When a story is broken by a blog and the mainstream media pick it up, to what extent is the blog owed a credit? We recently found ourselves in the middle of this debate when CalorieLab published the only account of a lurid event that had occurred in Tokyo, and eight days later French wire service Agence France-Presse released a similar account without crediting CalorieLab.
The deputy bureau chief at AFP in Tokyo dismissed our complaint on the basis that the information we gathered together into a story was in the public domain, free for AFP to follow up on and recreate in a story of their own, without credit to us. In effect their policy is, “It’s O.K. not to credit a blog if we look at all their links and reinterview all their sources.” Of course, we don’t claim any ownership over facts, but we think that we were owed a credit for finding and breaking the story.
At the end of this post we offer some suggestions to AFP on changes we feel they should make in their internal procedures.
Background
At the end of March an asexual Tokyo illustrator named Mao Sugiyama had elective surgery to remove his genitals and then went on to participate in an event on April 13 during which he cooked the genitals and served them to paying guests. This became a minor meme in a corner of the Japanese side of Twitter a day later when Shigenobu Matsuzawa, a blogger who attended the event published, and quickly removed, a post about the event.
No reporters were at the event, no other participants came forward on the internet to describe it, and attendance was no greater than 70.
CalorieLab’s Post
CalorieLab has done its share of weird Japan stories relating to food.
By chance we noticed a cryptic tweet linking to the short-lived Matsuzawa blog post and clicked through. Locating Sugiyama’s Twitter feed and personal website, and assembling information from all these sources and a phone chat with a police officer at the Suginami branch of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, we wrote a blog post (NSFW) and published it on May 17.
Of all the “only in Japan” aspects of this event, the strangest is the fact that the Japanese media, mainstream and internet, completely ignored it. To the extent that it was being discussed at all after the initial flurry of Twitter interest was only because news of it had made its way back to Japan from the CalorieLab account.
We watched our analytics and did daily Google searches to track the diffusion of the story (and sent out a half a dozen DMCA copyright infringement notifications to the hosting companies of websites who simply cut and pasted our work). On May 25 we noticed activity that led us to a new story from AFP.
AFP’s Story
It wasn’t easy hanging out there alone for eight days while internet commenters right and left cried “Hoax!” So we were relieved that a mainstream media organization like AFP had seen our post, retraced our investigation, and verified that the event really happened. But on the other hand we were annoyed that a mainstream media company had seen our post, retraced our investigation … and made no mention whatsoever of us in their article.
In most accounts of this sort, this is the point in the narrative where the ingenuous writer says something like, “We were sure it was just an oversight. We decided to contact these nice people, confident that they’d apologize and put it right.” But we won’t B.S. you: we had no such illusions. AFP is the badass Goldman Sachs frat boy of journalism, the company that filed a lawsuit against photographer Daniel Morel, whose image AFP sourced from Twitter and resold without payment.
Nevertheless, we sent a tweet to the two AFP staffers who had tweeted a link to the AFP version of the story, deputy Tokyo bureau chief Huw Griffith and reporter Karyn Nishi-Poupee. There was no response.
On the morning of May 28, we phoned Huw Griffith. He wouldn’t tell us who wrote the story. Without volunteering to look into it, Griffith immediately circled the wagons, saying, “We put together a story based on information in the public domain,” and “We communicated directly with the man himself.” But when questioned, Griffith didn’t seem to know the details of where they first heard of the story, the precise contents of AFP’s own story, which facts were sourced where, whether Sugiyama was contacted by phone or by e-mail, or how many times he was contacted. This unfamiliarity implies that whoever it is at AFP who knows the degree to which CalorieLab’s story was used, it isn’t Griffith, but the inquiry stopped with him.
The 4 Ways Mainstream Media Exploits Bloggers
Before getting into more details of the AFP article, let’s step back to examine the various ways in which mainstream media has been making use of material found originally in blogs and social media:
#1: Story Discovery
Journalists follow blogs and scan social media to be alerted to new story ideas. There’s nothing wrong with this, but is a credit due? We feel a credit is appropriate when all web references to a story ultimately trace back to the same blog source, which is then verified by the journalist.
#2: Source Collection
When a blogger has pursued a story via sources he identifies and the journalist relies on the same sources as a map to follow, without breaking new ground, it could be called “fact checking” if the blogger is credited. But it’s more accurate to call it “story laundering” if the blogger isn’t.
#3: Data Preservation
A blogger may have access to information whose public source is no longer extant when a story shows up on a mainstream journalist’s radar. In such a case identifying and crediting the source that preserved the information is important because the information is second-hand, analogous to hearsay. Readers need to be given the name of the intermediary to judge its credibility.
#4: Writing Snippets
Recycling a blogger’s phraseology or lightly rewriting it can range from flattery to, in more extreme forms, plagiarism. But even if it doesn’t rise to plagiarism, at the least it is evidence of the degree to which the blog post influenced the journalist, and is another factor when considering whether credit is appropriate.
CalorieLab’s Contribution
CalorieLab’s right to receive credit from AFP derives from the following:
- Calorielab surfaced the story from fragmentary Japanese-language reports on Twitter, a blog, and discussion forums. There was a sense of “What the heck happened, if anything?” at the time.
- CalorieLab discovered and preserved the only eyewitness account and images from the Matsuzawa blog post that was quickly deleted, before AFP and other Western (or Japanese) mainstream or other media heard of the story.
- CalorieLab looked into and resolved the major initial question about the story, of whether or not it was a hoax, by contacting the Suginami police, reading and correlating time-stamped tweets, communicating with the principal, and following links, as well as by processing and examining photographs from the deleted Matsuzawa blog post, several of which we have not published.
- Having discovered and assembled the elements of the story and having determined that it was a real story, CalorieLab wrote it up in a coherent narrative with detail, links, photos, and background research that allowed motivated readers to check up on it on their own and verify to their own satisfaction that it really happened, substantially as CalorieLab described it. (This detailed treatment and audit trail had the side effect of allowing AFP, with minimal reporting and work, to write their own story, implicitly misrepresenting it as wholly the result of their own efforts, with no credit to CalorieLab.)
Doing the Forensics on the AFP Story
For the record, here we document the specific ways in which CalorieLab’s post informed the AFP article, and it’s long and boring. Many readers will want to skim it or skip to the section below entitled “Enhanced Aggregation.”
The reporter who wrote APF’s article cited four sources. These were the same sources that CalorieLab used, plus the CalorieLab post, and substituting e-mail communication for communication via Twitter messages.
A. An Unnamed Website
The AFP article credits an unnamed website for only one piece of information: “Pictures published on a website appeared to show the meal came complete with mushrooms and a parsley garnish.”
This website is clearly CalorieLab. We published four photos from the Matsuzawa blog post (to which we initially linked, until it went dead, when we changed our link to another page on the blog). One of the dinner plate was severely underexposed, and we processed it in Photoshop to make the contents recognizable, if grainy.
From this image we thought we saw a mushroom and something that could have been parsley or cilantro, as well as other non-genital material that we couldn’t identify. We thus wrote “the chef garnished the genitals with button mushrooms and Italian parsley.”
That CalorieLab was the source can be deduced because of the selection of the ingredients mentioned. The only other source for the garnish is Sugiyama’s tweets, but he mentions three herbs, parsley, rosemary, and oregano, as well as tomatoes, but no mushrooms. And even if AFP had access to the Matsuzawa blog post, the mushrooms were not identifiable in the original photo without processing.
Although CalorieLab was anonymously credited for the garnish information, other information was simply repeated without even that level of credit. The genitals were described as “seasoned and braised,” the same language used by CalorieLab. Actually, they were “seasoned, dredged in flour, and fried.” We made a mistake. AFP copied us and propagated the mistake, and credited it to Sugiyama’s tweets and the police.
Sugiyama was identified as “reportedly 22.” We think that came from CalorieLab because had it come from Sugiyama directly (e-mail or blog) reportedly would be dropped.
AFP wrote that “diners were required to sign a waiver indemnifying Sugiyama and event organisers.” CalorieLab’s version was “Diners were required to sign a waiver releasing Sugiyama and the event organizers from any liability arising from the consumption of the genitals.” This information was not in Sugiyama’s tweets. CalorieLab got it from the Matsuzawa blog, specifically from an image of the waiver that we sharpened in Photoshop and read in order to compose our description of it. We did not publish this image in our post.
B. An E-mail
Huw Griffith told us that they had “communicated directly with the man himself,” and that they had “several exchanges” with him. The AFP article mentions this in a single two-sentence paragraph: “In an email to AFP, [Sugiyama] confirmed the event had taken place and said it was organised to raise awareness about ‘sexual minorities, x-gender, asexual people.’ He said he was readying to publish an official account of the day.”
But although direct quotes from a subject bring a story to life, and reporters go to great lengths to obtain them, the AFP article limits itself to the single phrase “sexual minorities, x-gender, asexual people,” embedded in an indirect restatement.
We do not believe that a significant e-mail exchange took place. Sugiyama is a quirky guy and difficult to engage. Although he publicly praised and recommended CalorieLab’s post in his tweet stream (while saying it was nevertheless “full of errors”), he ignored most questions we put to him. If AFP had several exchanges with Sugiyama why were they unable to confirm basic facts like his age (“The painter, who is reportedly 22″)? Why weren’t they able to find a single full-sentence quote to use? We think “sexual minorities, x-gender, asexual people” is the only useful thing AFP got out of him, probably from a single terse e-mail, and AFP is using their e-mail from Sugiyama as a fig leaf to avoid admitting their debt to CalorieLab.
C. Sugiyama’s Tweet Stream
As Huw Griffith said, Twitter is in the public domain (not literally, since the writers own the copyright to their work, but in the sense of being publicly accessible to anyone).
But ADP only knew about Sugiyama’s Twitter account because of links, translations and an image of it in CalorieLab’s post. Not only is Twitter the ultimate haystack of data, but even when you find an account you want to read, just getting Twitter to regurgitate three months of tweets by a prolific tweeter like Sugiyama is quite a task, not something you spend time doing if you’re not pretty sure there is something there.
D. Tokyo Police
AFP placed a phone call to an unnamed Suginami division police officer, adding no information other than what the police had already told CalorieLab on the 17th (although on the 17th the possibility that the event was a hoax was still being considered by the police).
Besides merely following in CalorieLab’s footsteps, the selection of the Suginami police as AFP’s only telephone interview demonstrates how much they were cribbing from CalorieLab’s post. When we wrote our post on the 17th the police seemed important to speak to because the source of the genitals was still in doubt. By the 25th that issue had been resolved, and if we had written our post then there were more interesting avenues to pursue, such as speaking to sex reassignment surgeons (or their regulators) about disposal of medical waste, speaking to medical authorities about the danger of eating medium rare genitals, speaking to the management of the event venue in Asagaya about what they had known (and asking whose name was on the rental agreement, and going on to contact that person or company), or speaking to representatives of sexual minority advocacy organizations about how the event helped or harmed their cause.
[Update: According to a June 1 report from Zakzak, evidently the first Japanese media report on the incident, on May 18, the day after we spoke to the Suginami police, the Suginami health department, at the behest of the police, conducted on on-site investigation of the venue and issued a warning the the proprietor for health code violations. This seems like a development that would have come up in any phone conversation with the Suginami police, yet AFP didn't mention it, only repeating the information on the legality of cannibalism that CalorieLab reported.]
Enhanced Aggregation
We feel that the AFP reporter treated this story as a quicky Huffington Post-like story, starting from our blog post, following our links, and recreating our only phone interview. AFP did not pursue any new lines of inquiry.
CalorieLab thus found itself on the business end of an “aggregation,” albeit an enhanced aggregation because AFP checked our facts. And we have no problem with that. We aggregate ourselves, but when we do it, we give credit (and a “dofollow” link). We promoted this very story by pitching it to dozens of blogs, internet news sites, and twitter accounts. We are used to our stories being written up, but we are used to at least getting credit, and often a link.
NightJack/Hijack
In 2009 the policeman author of the Orwell prize-winning blog NightJack, was outed by reporter Patrick Foster of The Times of London, who claimed he had followed subtle clues to the blogger’s identity on the internet. Foster was hailed as a cybersleuth genius, if a bit of a spoilsport.
But Foster had actually identified the blogger by hacking his e-mail account, later fabricating the elaborate explanation of how the blogger’s name was uncovered via Google sleuthing.
During an inquiry Lord Justice Leveson pointed out the speciousness of Foster’s claim the the blogger’s identity was already public before the hack: “[H]e’s choosing what facts he’s chasing up on…. because he knows what facts he’s looking for, he knows what bits he has to join together, he knows the attributes and characteristics of the person he has to search out…. He’d used what he knew and found a way through to achieve the same result. Because he couldn’t put out of his mind that which he already knew.”
The NightJack case has little direct relation to AFP’s article. AFP did nothing illegal. And once they found CalorieLab’s post there was no complicated cybersleuthing to do (“Click the link on CalorieLab to the tweets and read them, check; click the link on CalorieLab to Sugiyama’s website and e-mail him, check; call the Suginami cops as CalorieLab did, check; copy a few facts from CalorieLab we can’t find elsewhere, check”).
But the lesson we can draw from NightJack is that once someone shows you the complete picture of something, you’re not the same person you were before. As a reporter watching Japanese Twitter streams and reading Japanese forums and blogs you are going to see a lot of weird and dodgey stuff, much more than you can possibly justify following up on. The Sugiyama incident itself was widely suspected to be a hoax, even by the police when we spoke to them, and even by internet commenters after CalorieLab’s post was published with documentation.
The decision that the AFP reporter and editor made that pursuing this story was a worthwhile use of time, compared to, say, wild Fukushima birth defect rumors, owes a debt to the groundwork that CalorieLab, and only CalorieLab, did in initially gathering together the threads of the story, assembling a picture of what happened, and doing some verification.
What AFP should have done
When a media organization is accused of a possible breach of journalistic standards and ethics, and manners, it should be taken seriously. Rather than stonewalling it, Huw Griffith should have looked into things, or preferably asked a more neutral party to look into things.
The reporter should have been interviewed. The e-mail exchange with Sugiyama should have been examined. The two articles should have been read. Facts and phrases in the AFP piece should have been traced to their sources.
We think that the totality of circumstances would show that the story idea, all the sources and links, some additional information, and some phraseology came from CalorieLab or from the Matsuzawa blog via CalorieLab. We think that the fair thing to do would be for AFP to acknowledge that and apologize publicly.
We’s also like AFP to take concrete, public measures to implement credit and attribution standards for the use of material from bloggers and social media and to train their journalists and editors in their implementation.
Finally, the inappropriate manner in which our complaint to AFP Tokyo was treated reveals a need to establish a formalized process within AFP for handling complaints from parties who feel they were wronged and to appoint trained personnel to administer it.
We’re not naive enough to think that will happen. So our fallback hope is that AFP will at least refrain from suing us for “commercial defamation,” as they did with Daniel Morel, the photographer. That’s a win of sorts.
The Purloined Genitals: How Agence France-Presse Severed Our Blog from the Story We Broke is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog
Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/05/30/purloined-genitals/
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