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How to Find If You’ve Been Plagiarized

I’ve had my humor columns plagiarized three times in the last 10 years, the last two happening within 25 days of each other. The most recent one happened Monday, and ended with the plagiarist resigning his position as a newspaper publisher 24 hours later.

In the first case, I found out about it myself by doing some basic Google research. The last two, I was emailed because someone else did the same thing, and then did more diligent research, and identified a number of other humor writers who had been stolen from.

If you’re worried about your stuff getting stolen, here are a few things you can do to protect yourself:

1) Google unique phrases and sentences.

The way most people check for plagiarism is to do a Google search for a unique phrase. The lede sentence here, “I’ve had my humor columns plagiarized three times in the last 10 years” is unique — no one has ever used it, in fact — so I would pop something like that in the Google search box.

But, and this is important, you have to put quotes around the entire sentence. This tells Google, “I want to find only instances of these words in this order. If they’re not in this order, don’t serve me the results.” That means sentences that say cooking columns instead of humor columns won’t show up.

Check at least three sentences per piece, just in case one of them was edited. And don’t search for sentences that contain the following:

  • Specific locations: One of my plagiarists changed my city names to his city names so they would be more specific to him.
  • Specific names: Any semi-smart plagiarist is going to know enough to change your spouse’s name to their spouse’s name. Same with kids, pets, and friends.
  • Dates: Unless it’s something historic, don’t search for dates. If you talk about being in college 15 years ago, that will get changed to suit the writer’s personal timeline.

Pick unusual sentences that seem almost innocuous. A string of words that is both unique and unnoticed at the same time. “I snapped my computer lid shut and took a drink” is a safe bet, “”But I’ve never been to Tallahasee!” Gladys shrieked.”

2) Search with Copyscape.com.

I was playing around with Copyscape for a couple of days, and quickly hit my free searches per month limit. They only charge $.05 per search on the Pro plan, so it may be a good purchase if you’re especially worried about being ripped off. It searches all content on a whole web page, rather than unique phrases, and it looks for any matching or near-matching phrases, not just ones you specify.

You can also drop in blocks of text to search for, which is useful if you work with freelance writers or teach high school and college classes.

The same company also has CopySentry.com, which will do regular searches on pages you’ve already written. It does a regularly scheduled search for any possible matches, and emails you the results.

3) Put a copyright statement with your name on every piece

Admittedly, this is like putting a sign on your window that says “please do not steal my TV,” but this may have the desired effect on one or two people. It also gives you a leg to stand on if you ever have to defend it legally. After all, the thief had to remove the copyright statement in order to publish it, so they can’t argue “It was like that when I found it.”

Two caveats about plagiarism

1) It’s not plagiarism if your name is still on it. If you find someone has lifted your stuff and left your name intact, that may be a copyright violation, but it’s not plagiarism. You’re still getting credit for your work.
2) You can’t steal an idea. Someone else may have — and probably has had — an idea on whatever it is you wrote about. If you’re talking about “five ways to rock your next presentation,” it’s been done. If you’re writing about “paintings you must see before you die,” it’s been done. In fact, any idea you had has already been done. Unless you invented something that has never been done before, you’re going to have a tough time proving that you had your idea first. If this is the case, speak to an Intellectual Property attorney.

Once you’ve found out your stuff has been lifted, your first instinct may be to go on the warpath and hammer the thief like the fist of an angry god. Hold that thought. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about what steps to take if you find you have had your stuff stolen. (Preview: It’s not to immediately confront the thief. There’s some work involved.)

Photo credit: jamesmorton (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Yet Another Serial Plagiarist Busted by Google

March is International Serial Plagiarist Month, apparently. Because it’s the month that I discovered my humor columns being ripped off by, not one, but two newspaper editors in North America.

Yesterday morning, I received an email from humor columnist, George Waters, who said that we, plus 12 other humor writers, had been ripped off by Steve Jeffrey, publisher of The Anchor in Chestermere, Alberta, Canada, in 42 columns out of the last 52 weeks.

Not just a line here or there, or one of the funnier jokes. He did a complete copy-and-paste job, made some edits to give it a local flavor, and then published it under his name.

(You can read a very thorough writeup of the plagiarism situation by Andrew Beaujon of The Poynter Institute, a journalism school in Florida.)

If only plagiarists were this easy to catch.

Earlier this month, Jon Flatland of the Blooming Prairie (Minn.) Times was found to have been plagiarizing humor columns and blogs from several humor writers, possibly as far back as 15 – 18 years ago. He resigned in disgrace, and his publisher notified the Minnesota Newspaper Foundation and another writer notified the North Dakota Newspaper Association about his plagiarism. He’ll never work in newspapers again.

And 25 days later I get another email that I have been stolen from yet again, but I was only ripped off twice. Fellow humorist Sheila Moss had 24 columns lifted.

How do we know? Because Waters copied every single column published under Steve Jeffrey’s name from the last 52 weeks — the online archives for anything beyond that were not available — and Googled unique phrases from each and every piece, and found columns that were written beforehand by someone else. That’s how he found me and three Canadians, eight Americans, and one Australian. I’ve also used Google Cache to find copies of my columns in The Anchor’s Issuu.com PDF newspapers. (Note: Just because you delete something from your website doesn’t mean it’s gone; Google saves this in their cache for weeks and even months.)

But that didn’t stop Jeffrey from expressing bewilderment at the accusation that 80% of his columns were found to be nearly identical to columns by other people. According to Beaujon’s article:

Reached by telephone in Alberta, where he said he was about to travel to British Columbia for two weeks, Jeffrey seemed baffled by Waters’ allegations. His column, he told me, doesn’t even touch on comedy. “I don’t write humor, and I don’t blog,” he said. “I write a ‘Lighthouse’ column, but ‘Lighthouse’ is about local politics.”

Well, the Lighthouse columns I read from August 25, 2011 and October 13, 2011 looked an awful lot like mine, with a few details changed. One is from 2003 about the three hours I worked as a telemarketer in college, and the other was an open letter to a fictitious fellow traveler to Boston. In 18 years, I have never written about local Canadian politics.

God Save Me From Newspaper Editors

As blogging has grown in popularity, bloggers have been increasingly under attack by the media. Bobby King, president of the Indianapolis Newspaper Guild, once called us the animals in the blogosphere. And yet, it’s not the bloggers, but the highly trained professional newspaper people that have stolen from me.

Three times.

In all the years that I’ve been a humor writer, I’ve had my work stolen by three different newspaper editors. (I discovered my work being lifted back in the early 2000s by an assistant editor of a weekly paper in Ontario.)

That means Canada leads the U.S. in theft of my work, 2 to 1.

But I have never found a legitimate, serious blogger stealing anything of mine. (That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, but I’ve never found it.)

What’s most frustrating about this is that I’ve been writing my newspaper column for little to no pay for all these years, publishing it in 10 different newspapers around Indiana, and in The American Reporter online. I do this because I love writing, and I love making people laugh. Humor writing has never been about the money. I’ve tried self-syndicating, but found very few takers. “We don’t have the budget,” is the frequent answer. So I gave up trying to earn money from it, and just do it because I love it.

So it frosts me when editors — bearers of journalistic ethics and integrity — profit dishonestly from my work. They collect salaries, they collect advertising revenue, and they make their living by stealing something they weren’t willing to pay me for.

I still consider journalism to be a noble profession, and I still think editors play a vital role in informing the public. I won’t paint all editors with the same overgeneralizing brush that people like Bobby King have painted my profession. Hell, I got my “professional” writing start thanks to one newspaper editor in northern Indiana who took a chance on me 18 years ago, so I am forever grateful to editors as a whole.

But I’m also getting sick of media professionals decrying the state of the blogging industry, when it’s their brethren who keep stealing my stuff. If you want to talk about “the animals in the blogosphere,” let’s first have a conversation about “the thieves in the editors’ offices.”

Otherwise, get your own house in order before you attack mine.

And quit stealing my stuff.

Fallout from Steve Jeffrey’s Serial Plagiarism

Here’s what has happened since the theft was first discovered:

All archives from The Anchor’s website were removed immediately after the Poynter.org story, as have all of their PDF versions from Issuu.com.

I’ve been in touch with the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association and I launched an official complaint with the Alberta Press Council. I don’t know what results those will bring, but hopefully we’ll see some sort of investigation and resolution.

UPDATE: According to an article in the Calgary Herald (“Calgary-area newspaper editor resigns following plagiarism allegations”, Steve Jeffrey resigned his position as publisher of The Anchor today (Tuesday). According to the article,

“I really don’t have any way to defend myself. I did use articles for inspiration, but thought that I had changed the content enough to comply,” (Jeffrey) said in an e-mail to the Herald.

Ripped Off Columnists

All links point to at least one stolen newspaper column or blog:

Stories about Steve Jeffrey’s serial plagiarism:

Because I believe in thoroughness and the power of search engine optimization, you can also read stories about Steve Jeffrey’s serial plagiarism at these blogs and newspapers:

 

Photo credit: welcome2bo (Flickr)

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One More Method to Breaking Writer’s Block

Yesterday, I shared six methods for breaking through writer’s block. But I forgot one of my most favorite ones.

Writer's Block

If you find you’re stuck for a way to explain something or can’t quite figure out a direction of a story or article, explain it to a friend. I mean actually sit down face-to-face with someone and tell them what you’re trying to accomplish. If necessary, pull out paper and pen, and diagram what you’re talking about.

I’ve often found that in order to be able to put my thought process into words, I have to be able to crystallize my thoughts. It causes all the thoughts that are pinballing around my head to get into formation, and I can express them clearly and logically.

Once I do that, I get unstuck for what I’m trying to say, and everything makes sense. I will occasionally pop open my laptop or notebook and scribble down the thoughts in a brief outline, which I can go back to later. It especially helps if I have several minutes after talking to that person to put everything down in a complete idea dump, which I can go back and fix later.

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Six Sure-Fire Methods to Break Writer’s Block

A lot of writers suffer from writer’s block. That big mental wall that sometimes get in the way of getting any writing done. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. Only a few times have people suffered career-ending writer’s block, but when that happens, we’ve gone beyond just plain ol’ writer’s block, and are getting into some serious performance anxiety.

Here are six sure-fire methods you can use to break through your own writer’s block.Erik Deckers' Moleskine & Coffee Tumbler

  • Carry a notebook with you at all times: I keep a little black Moleskine notebook and pen with me close at hand. Whenever I have an idea or a thought that I know I’ll want to use later, I write it down. If I have several minutes, I’ll write as much as I can about the idea that inspired me. Oftentimes, when I’m stuck for a topic or struggling with an idea, I’ll pull out the notebook and refer to what I’ve already written. Or if I’ve written enough, the material from the notebook is what I needed in the first place. I just transcribe it and clean it up.
  • Write something else: Most writers I know get hung up on one particular project. They can’t write this blog post, they can’t write that article. So write something else. If you’re a professional writer, or even a persistent amateur, there’s always something else to write. So write that instead. It often gets the juices flowing, and you can break the block. When you feel it break, immediately switch over to the project you were stuck on.
  • Write it in an email instead: Most writers seem to get stuck because they’re writing for posterity. They’re thinking not only of The Reader, but The Reader in 50 Years. I don’t know how many journals and notebooks I started and then trashed because I thought, “what if my grandchildren read this in 50 years” or “what if someone wants to study my writings in 100 years? What will they find?” I immediately froze up, got two entries into the journal, and then quit. I lost count of the notebooks I’ve pitched because of this.
    If this happens to you, regardless of what you’re writing, write it in an email instead. Start it out with “Dear Mom, this is something I’m working on right now.” Then write your project/article/blog post to your mom. We love our moms, and they love us. But they don’t always get what we’re working on. So write this in terms your mom will understand. Then, go back and delete the greeting, and you’ve got your piece. Stop writing for The Reader and The Future Reader. Write for yourself. And your mom. And call her once in a while, she misses you.
  • Pick a different environment: I have two offices. My regular office and my favorite coffee shop. Some weeks see me in one office more than the other. And there are times that being in one place or the other is not conducive to getting work done. So I go to the other office. The change in environment is often enough to jolt me out of my stuckness. But if it doesn’t work — and I can usually feel the torpor coming on — I’ll go somewhere completely different. A different coffee shop, a friend’s office (Tip: Make sure they own the business. Don’t stop by your friend’s place inside the giant corporate building.) The new setting is usually enough to jolt me out of my complacency and get my creative juices flowing again.
  • Write nonsense:I’ve never been a fan of writing exercises to get warmed up. This isn’t running. I’m not going to injure my brain if I don’t write something “creative” before I start real writing. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some validity to just writing complete and utter crap for the first 20 minutes. If you’re stuck on a particular topic, write stream-of-consciousness stuff about your subject, maybe even the piece itself. As you write, do it in an over-the-top voice and style, like Sideshow Mel from The Simpsons. As you do this, you’ll find yourself breaking through the block and starting to write some real material. But don’t delete the crap. Cut-and-paste it into another document, and then go back and read it a couple days later. You may find some nuggets worth keeping.
  • Quit waiting to be inspired: Once you become a professional writer, you don’t have the luxury of having writer’s block. You also don’t have the luxury of “being inspired” or “waiting for the right moment.” Real writers don’t get inspired. Real writers plant their asses in their chairs and start writing. If the words aren’t coming, try one of the other five things I mentioned. If they still aren’t coming, put your head down, and keep writing. They’ll come to you eventually.
    Most professional writers ignore the writer’s block, because they have a job to do, and they do what they need to to get it done. There’s no such thing as an accountant’s block, where the figures just don’t add up. Or a chemist’s block, because they can’t get the formulas right. When you reach this level of writing, the words just come automatically, like breathing and eating. You may have times where your work is better, but as a professional writer, even your “good enough” should be pretty good.

What about you serious writers? How do you break through writer’s block? How do you prevent it? Has anything worked or not worked? And did any of those involve alcohol?

Update: After I wrote this post, I thought of one more method to breaking writer’s block, which I published the following day.

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5 Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3

Google Panda 3.3 has caught some people off-guard and made a lot of SEO professionals freak out. After perusing SEOMoz’s discussions on the matter — these are the guys who do SEO for a living — it seems no one really knows what Panda 3.3 has done to their sites. I just know a lot of people aren’t happy about it.

There was one particular change, out of 40, that has everyone freaked out: “Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.”

Now, no one knows for sure what it means, but chances are, if you have been relying on a backlinking strategy to increase your search engine ranking, or you’re painfully agonizing over your anchor text’s keywords, that may become a problem for you in a few days or weeks. We’ll have to see.

In Wednesday’s post, I discussed four changes Panda 3.3 is bringing to bloggers.

  • Improvements to freshness: Google can put fresh content in their results more quickly. Newer posts, articles, and pages are found more easily. This means the quicker you are in hopping on a trending topic, the more likely you are to win search.
  • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: They can see when a new topic is spiking in popularity, and makes it easier to identify in realtime. If you search for breaking news, you’ll be able to find it sooner, and start writing about it.
  • Improved local results: They can more easily detect whether search queries and the results are local to you. If you search for “Topeka plumber,” and you’re sitting in Topeka, they’ll make sure you see those results first.
  • Link evaluation: This is the big one that’s freaking SEOs out.

Based on these four important changes, what kinds of changes can/should you make to your blog to take advantage of the Google Panda 3.3 update, as well as past updates over the last 12 months? These are five long-term changes you need to start making right now, and make as a part of your regular blogging habit.

1. Focus on local content whenever possible.

If you own a local business, or you’re a local businessperson, you need to write about your business in your city whenever possible. If you’re a real estate agent, write posts about real estate in your city. “How to Stage Your Minneapolis Home Before a Showing,” “Five Things To Fix Before Your Next Minneapolis Home Inspection.” Be sure to use the name of the city in the body copy too.

Learn the html schema code for your particular data types, and tag the appropriate content. (More on schemas in a minute).

2. Use the rel=author tag in your Author bio, point it at your Google+ profile.

First, make sure you have a Google+ profile. (There’s plenty of stuff out there about why you should be using it, so I won’t go into that here. Just know that it’s especially important to SEO now.)

Next, make sure that every blog post you write, whether it’s your own or a guest post, links back to the Google+ profile, and uses the “rel=author” tag. Here’s an example:

<a href=”http://bit.ly/xyLk6s” rel=”author”>Erik Deckers</a>

Hint: By shortening your Google+ profile link with Bitly, it gives you another analytics measurement point. If you really want to get creative, use campaign codes with each article you publish or guest publish, and you can see what kind of click-through traffic you’re getting from a post to your profile.

3. Use schemas whenever possible.

Schemas are a new web classification system created by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Among other things, this is going to help with local search, as well as personal branding, because you can add your city and your name to your blog posts. This will help Google and the other search engines identify you and your town. You’re going to get a boost in local results and a boost on searches for your name.

There are a few hundred schema types, and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to learn and use them all. In the meantime, there are plugins to use, and you can also identify a few useful schema tags for yourself to use on a regular basis.

For example, if you’re using the PostalAddress schema, to tell Google “this is my local address,” you would write:

<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>5348 Tacoma Ave.</span>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Indianapolis</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>IN</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>46220</span>

We’re starting to use schemas here at Pro Blog Service, but we’re still learning the best ways to use it, and are limiting ourselves mostly to the SchemaFeed plugin for WordPress. Suffice to say, schema is a giant, complex system, and by using it only for blog posts, it’s like using a race car to drive down the block. Still, we’re just bloggers, so what do you want?

We’ll have more about using schemas for blogs in a future post. For more information in the meantime, visit Schema.org.

4. Fix your grammar and punctuation errors

One of the changes that Panda has wrought, starting back when it was first introduced was, that it even started looking at grammar and punctuation errors. While Google has not said they are evaluating pages for grammar and punctuation quality, we have discussed in the past how they are looking at user-generated indicators — time on site, bounce rate, click-through rate — to determine the quality of a blog or website. If your page is filled with errors, and visitors don’t like reading what you wrote, they won’t stick around for very long, and Google will determine that your page must not be a good one.

The same is true for the quality of your writing. If you’re a good writer, or even a fairly passable writer, you have nothing to worry about. If your writing has all the quality of a 10,000 word conspiracy theory manifesto that was written at 3 am in someone’s parents’ basement, then you’re going to have problems.

5. Don’t worry so much about anchor text and backlinks

Like I’ve said, no one is sure exactly what Google meant by “we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Some people think it means anchor text is no longer a factor, other people think it means they have devalued backlinks. Google already devalued backlinks when they first released Panda, but others have tested this and found that links still carry some weight.

We do know that Google has been seriously knocking many of these link farms and poor quality sites that did nothing but create thousands upon thousands of backlinks. Any SEO strategies that were built on this tactic are now (or soon will be) on the scrap heap, completely useless.

If you have been knocking yourself out trying to earn backlinks and you agonize over anchor text, you may want to pull back a little on it. Don’t give up on it yet, because until someone knows for sure which indicator has been shut off, it’s still a viable strategy. All we’re saying is don’t give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out exactly the right keywords and placing all the right backlinks in all the right places.

While these five changes are rather involved, they’re going to be important in the coming months as Google continues to force us to focus more on the quality of our writing and content, and less on the automated SEO strategies that many people have been employing as a way to game the system.

If you’ve already been writing good stuff, and earning your links organically, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re good to go. Keep up the good work.

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Writers, Your Biggest Competition Isn’t Other Writers, It’s Mediocrity

About 20 years ago, I used to sell high end stereos. Across the street in our small city was another high end stereo store.

The first time their sales manager walked in the door and started talking with our sales manager like they were good friends, I was surprised. After the guy left, I asked my manager why he was so friendly with the competition.

“He’s not the competition,” he said.

“How do you figure?” I asked.

“Because our competition is the Big Box store a few few miles away.”

He explained that our high end stereo store, whose low end components were a $400 Yamaha receiver and a small pair of $300 speakers, appealed to audiophiles and people who could appreciate the quality of a really good stereo system. The store across the street sold different brand names, but equally high quality.

The difference between a great photographer or writer and an acceptable one? Skills, experience, and knowledge.

Big Box, however, sold $179 receivers and giant speakers for $120 a pair. (To put it in perspective, you could walk out with a $12,000 system from our store; the most you could spend at Big Box was about $800.)

They were our real competition, because we had to convince the price shoppers who showed up on a Saturday that there truly was a difference in the sound quality between ours and Big Box’s, and that the bouncy lights on the front of the cheap stereo didn’t actually do anything for the sound quality. (You wouldn’t believe how many people I tried to talk out of the bouncy lights.)

They didn’t hear the difference. They believed a stereo was a stereo, and while, yes, ours was very good, they could get a whole stereo with bouncy lights for a fraction of the price we wanted for an average receiver. Of course, they were disappointed when they got home, and they realized the music just didn’t sound as good as it did in our store.

It’s the same problem we writers face. Too many times, we talk to potential blogging clients who think writing is writing. They’ve found a writer who will work at a fraction of our price — sure they live in another part of the world, and English is their third or fourth language, but, you know, they charge a lot less — or their nephew got an A on his senior English paper, and knows a lot about the Internet, and he’s going to do the whole project for $75 and a Starbucks gift card.

Our biggest competition isn’t other writers, it’s people who think that writing is writing. That stringing coherent sentences together is so easy, a monkey can do it. After all, they reason, we learned it in high school, so how hard can it be?

Recently, I was talking to Paul D’Andrea, a professional photographer friend, who said he faces the same thing. Despite the years of study and practice, and the thousands of dollars of equipment he carts around his biggest competition is not another equally good photographer. It’s the guy with a $200 digital camera or the latest and greatest mobile phone. (Paul took the leaf photo in this post. You can’t do that with a cell phone.)

After all, they reason, you just point and shoot. Don’t cut off the heads, crank up the flash, and hit the little button with your right index finger. How hard can it be?

I may have a decent camera, but I realize that even Paul’s “average” work has a level of mastery I’ll never achieve. If I ever want good photos, I need someone like Paul. And if someone wants good writing, they can’t just hire a college senior and expect expert-level writing.

Unfortunately for writers, while the Internet has made it possible to reach more customers from a wider base, it’s also created a problem for us. Now anyone with a laptop and a rudimentary command of the English language can hang out a shingle and call themselves a writer.

If you want to demonstrate your writing ability, you need high-quality samples, strong testimonials, and be able to demonstrate how your writing has succeeded and benefitted your clients. Be able to measure ROI, sales, and even regular readership. Show search engine placement and rankings. List writing awards. And most importantly, show whether businesses have made money by working with you.

Look, anyone can take pictures with even the crappiest cameras. Anyone can write copy with a laptop and an 8th grade education. That doesn’t mean it’s any good. Sadly, it also doesn’t mean that people will recognize its lack of quality either.

It’s going to take some work on your part, writers and photographers, to educate your potential clients as to why all writing isn’t the same, why your work is better than everyone else’s, and why you’re worth the higher price tag.

Photo credit: Paul D’Andrea (Flickr)