As a subscriber to The New Yorker magazine, I receive e-mail correspondence alerting me of news and events related to the publication. Yesterday, I received an e-mail advertisement from The New Yorker informing me that for $299.00, I could, literally, hold eight decades of issues of the magazine in the palm of my hand.
The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive could be mine, or yours, if I so desired a complete electronic archive of the magazine that dates back to its inception in 1925. In an age where the technological advancements are occurring almost too quickly to keep up with, it is no surprise that such electronic archives will soon be as easily accessible to us as the address book in our cellular telephones.
The e-mail advertisment I received touted this new digital technology as a thing of the future:
Hold over 4,000 issues in the palm of your hand with The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive. A great literary tradition meets the latest technology. Blazingly fast, it's small enough to drop into your pocket and take everywhere. Updated through April 2006, this little dynamo is a New Yorker lover's dream-come-true. Enjoying this acclaimed electronic archive of every page of the first eight decades of The New Yorker, exactly as it appeared in print, is easier and faster than ever, thanks to this new, portable, high-performance Hard Drive. Encased in brushed aluminum, the Hard Drive measures a mere 3" × 5". Up to ten times faster than the original DVDs • 80 G USB-powered Hard Drive with USB cable • Plugs directly into USB 2.0 port on your computer; no separate power supply required • Contains every page of every issue of The New Yorker, February 1925-April 2006 • 20 G of extra space, so there’s plenty of room for subsequent updates Pre-order The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive today for shipping in late September and we’ll include free personalized engraving on the back. All this for $299 and the shipping is free.*
My first instinct is to be amazed. What will they think of next? Human memory is virtually becoming obsolete, as our society relies more and more heavily on computers and other such technologies to think for us. Should we be excited, or frightened? Perhaps the Wachowski brothers' 1999 dystopian trilogy, The Matrix, wasn't so far-fetched, afterall, when it illustrated the possible cultural apocalypse that could result from a society so dependent on technology. But I digress.
More pertinent to our craft, it seems, are the seemingly obvious ethical implications of having eight decades' worth of The New Yorker magazine literally at our fingertips. It is sad that such an impressive development raises these kinds of questions, however, in the wake of scandals of such journalists as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, it is almost impossible not to ask: What will happen when reporters have infinite access to any publication's archive for a relatively small price? Would more and more plagiarism cases transpire if journalists could, potentially, regurgitate material from back issues of magazines, newspapers, etc.? Online archives exist already, but having a publication in its entirety at one's disposal takes this idea to the extreme.
Conversely, this may actually be a positive innovation in the realm of journalism. Afterall, having such easy access to electronic archives will facilitate faster "checking up" on alleged rule-breakers. Perhaps, and it should be our hope that, it will force reporters to be more honest in their craft, or at least to be aware that the chances of getting caught just became much greater. In fact, this could be a very good thing.
Conor R. Friedersdorf (not verified) @ September 14, 2006 - 3:53pm
It seems to me that journalists are far more likely to get away with plagiarizing from old issues of the New Yorker if they are gathering dust in the recesses of a very few libraries than if they are easily searchable by alert editors, bloggers and readers who are likely to notice plagiarism.
If Google succeeds in putting every book in the English language Online -- perhaps I exaggerate their ambition, but not by much -- I think that will hurt the ability of journalists to plagiarize too.
I foresee a day when an automatic part of the editing process is running stories through software that checks copy against a database and detects passages that match.
Some unethical reporters who seek shortcuts will doubtless re-order words and phrases while lifting paragraphs. But as successfully plagiarizing requires more work to avoid getting caught -- especially as it approaches the amount of work writing the piece oneself would require -- I suspect that particular kind of journalistic sin will wane.
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