9:01 PM

natashavc:

I feel pretty queasy and gross here. NPR interviewed me for their bath salts piece. They used my sources and direct quotes. No mention of my reporting or Spin in their 11 minute piece and write up. There’s too much overlap, too many similar quotes, and too many of the same sources to not credit me/Spin.

Magazines, newspapers, and news shows are usually shy to site other publications because it makes their outlet seem as though they are late to breaking something. To avoid that issue, the outlet will usually cover a whole different angle of a subject and do enough original reporting that making mention of another paper or program that covered the topic is unnecessary — even though THERE WOULD BE ZERO HARM IN DOING SO. In this case, NPR  went back to all my sources, recorded them saying super similar or slightly altered quotes that appeared in my story, used a phone interview with me to fill in the gaps, and wrote about the same exact subject I covered in my piece (the DEA Lab in Virginia; analog law) —with ZERO citation.  They didn’t even expand on anything! It’s the same structure, scope, and length as my Virginia section.

This isn’t a conceptual issue, as bath salts are a national story, it’s a sourcing and plagiarism issue. It makes me angry and sad because this was not some think piece about the nature of handjobs and gender identity on Girls, or some other piece of criticism that draws from the same intellectual well but actual hard reporting that took months.