The Hartford Courant found to be misappropriating local news

Posted by Simon Day on September 2, 2009 at 12:20 PM

Connecticut newspapers have been seeing universal misappropriation of the local online and print news content by the daily paper the Hartford Courant, NewBritanHerlad.com. reported on Saturday.

The Courant has been using other newspapers local coverage with attribution to papers such as the Journal Inquirer, The Bristol Press, The Herald of New Britain, the Register-Citizen of Torrington, and the Waterbury Republican-American.

However the Hartford paper has also been reproducing content with little or no changes without any attribution to the original source.

Bristol Press and New Britain Herald Publisher Michael E. Schroeder said that the papers have had stories taken by the Courant with "minimal or no attribution."

Although still evaluating the approach the newspapers will take to the misappropriation Schroeder did say that he "expects to enforce our rights to the letter of the law. The newspaper that produces copy pays to get it produced. We serve our market very intensely. Any wholesale lifting of the product of our work is at best plagiarism, at worst outright theft."

Jonathan Kellogg, executive editor at the Waterbury Republican-American, said he found a number of bylined Courant stories that "are including information from the Republican-American," and online "there certainly is an extraordinary amount" of plagiarized material.

"In this day of electronic journalism, it's pretty hard not to see some of this stuff show up. The thing that we still have to get our heads around is what's reasonable, and everybody is trying to define that standard," Kellogg said.

Journal Inquirer Managing Editor Chris Powell has expressed his frustration at The Courant profiting from the "misappropriating on a wholesale basis local stories published in the Journal Inquirer" in a letter to the Courant's Publisher Richard J. Graziano.

"While attribution to the JI of the occasional big story we have broken may be welcome, The Courant's frequent use of the JI's work to report ordinary events in the towns in which our circulation overlaps is not welcome -- it's theft of copyrighted material and costly to us," Powell wrote.

Courant spokeswoman Andrea Savastra responded to the newspapers' claims by email, "We are respectful of others' intellectual property just as we expect them to be of ours," The Courant statement said. "We take these claims very seriously and are looking into the matter. The Hartford Courant never would intentionally use material from another news source without proper attribution."

The Courant has been stretched by job cuts leaving it with a newsroom almost half its original size and a page reduction of 25 percent, after owner Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy in December