PressEthic

Michael Calderone of The New York Observer reported on a silly father-son spat yesterday.

Chris Beam, 21, called out his father, Alex Beam of The Boston Globe, for not crediting his blog, Ivygateblog.com for an item in his bi-weekly bolumn. Alex Beam wrote about a quirky letter-to-the-editor writer in his Nov. 28 Globe article.

According to Calderone: "Ms. Ackerman’s name and hobby had appeared on IvyGate five days earlier—but that Web site was not credited in Mr. Beam’s column in The Boston Globe."

Alex Beam had no apologies for his actions.

“When I plagiarize, I always plagiarize from IvyGate,” Mr. Beam père said when confronted by phone that same day. The elder Beam had a defense ready: “I had written a whole queasy column on this subject a week earlier!”

Indeed, Alex Beam’s Nov. 20 column examined “the subculture of newspaper letter-writers, the men and women who beg to differ …. ”

A reader responded to that column by sending an e-mail about Ms. Ackerman, triggering Mr. Beam’s next column on letter-writers.

And because Ms. Ackerman teaches at an Ivy League school—and because she uses a photo of a black cat with piercing yellow eyes for her faculty Web page, rather than her own likeness—Alex Beam passed that information on to both his son and IvyGate co-founder Nick Summers. “It had humor and bizarreness that we come to associate with IvyGate,” he said.

So apparently, Alex Beam actually gave his son the idea first, so maybe he can claim it as his own. Chris Beam didn't credit his father for giving IvyGate the tip in their original post. So who knows who's in the right and wrong here. But it's still a strange situation, indeed. Beam me up, Beams!