When Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Seth Rorabaugh read the CBC’s aggregated version of a story on Penguins defenseman Olli Maata joining the Finish military, he noticed the piece shared details that were awfully familiar to a story he wrote back in 2013.
This @hockeynight story on Finland's military sure seems familiar: pic.twitter.com/Nlt6xCZmr2
— Seth Rorabaugh (@SethRorabaugh) March 15, 2016
As you can see from Rorabaugh’s tweet, the CBC’s news story reworded his story and didn’t credit him or link to his piece. A large part of the story clearly went beat by beat based off of Rorabaugh’s piece but didn’t acknowledge that in the slightest.
Rorabaugh and many other members of hockey Twitter drew attention to the story, and the CBC swiftly responded, removing author Steve Tzemis’ byline, slightly reworked the piece, fixed a spelling error and added in the following sentence attributing the news properly.
“Seth Rorabaugh of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote about Finnish players serving in the military back in 2013.”
The Hockey Night in Canada Twitter account sent out a thank you to Rorabaugh for notifying them of the copying and acknowledged they updated the story to make it “accurate.”
@emptynetters A sincere thank you for flagging this to us. We've updated the story to make it accurate. https://t.co/jJFk4gmH0O
— HockeyNightInCanada (@hockeynight) March 15, 2016
Tzemis himself sent an apology to Rorabaugh, which was graciously accepted.
@SteveTzemis Apology accepted Steve. Take care.
— Seth Rorabaugh (@SethRorabaugh) March 15, 2016
The most important part of writing aggregation is properly crediting the story while making the piece more than just a rip-job of the original. That wasn’t done here. I’m not sure how an editor approved and published the story given all the details that weren’t attributed, but good on the CBC for quickly acknowledging the issue and rectifying it immediately – even if that doesn’t forgive the mistake.
