Kevin: The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, looks into instances of plagiarism by Zachery Kouwe, a blogger with the business blog Dealbook. Kouwe was caught lifting passages from other blogs and news sources. Quoting and linking is part of blog culture and is acceptable. However, lifting others writing shouldn't be a part of journalism or blogging, or any marriage of the two.

Kevin: Felix Salmon at Reuters wades into the discussion about Zachery Kouwe, one of the journalists writing the Dealbook business blog at the New York Times. After complaints from Wall Street Journal and an internal investigation at the Times, Kouwe resigned. The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, said that "Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin".
Salmon has a different take, and one that I agree with. He argues that far from adopting blogging culture, Kouwe didn't go far enough. "The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course."

Kevin: Juditgh Townend at Journalism.co.uk looks at whether the culture at the NYTimes DealBook led to plagiarism and the resignation of Zachery Kouwe. Judith does a great round up of the analysis by Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor, at the New York Times and other analysis from Felix Salmon at Reuters. Felix raises another issue for the NYTimes, and one that I tend to agree with. "The answer, in truth, is not that the NYT has gone too far down the bloggish rabbit hole, but rather that it hasn’t gone far enough." Quoting and linking is part of blogging, but if you take text not as a quote by passing it off as your own work and don't link, that indeed is plagiarism.

Kevin: I've been working on how location can easily be integrated into a journalism workflow since I geo-tagged pictures, Tweets and blog posts during the 2008 US election. While many commercial geo-location services have arrived, including Fire Eagle, Gowalla and Four Square, geo-location lags at news organisations. Juniper Research says that mobile location-based services will generate $12.7b in revenue by 2014. As we've seen with other technologies, location is moving from early adopters quickly to early mass adoption driven by social networking applications. The Next Web looks at some of the revenue streams that will drive location based services. Definitely one to read.