National Journal vs. CQ Weekly: A Plagiarist's Calendar
Yesterday, in the sort of bow-tie-set jello wrestling that we love more than anything,National Journalgot all pissy withCQ Weekly for distributing a calendar with identical information : evidently, theNJhas a copyright on Congressional birthdays. But this morning, the memo goes out insideCQ, and yup, stuff was lifted part and parcel—but the marketing department did it, honest!
The memo follows.
To the Newsroom:
The congressional calendar distributed this week to all CQ Weekly subscribers was produced and edited by the CQ Marketing Dept., which takes sole responsibility for its content. It contains information from a variety of sources, but it also includes member birthdays and political events around the country that were improperly lifted by marketing personnel from a similar National Journal calendar published last month.
News Division employees were NOT involved in any of the content creation, nor the content fact checking, of this project. I knew about the calendar project and our photographer and graphics specialists were hired by CQ Marketing to design it and choose CQ photos. But the Marketing staff then added content after our involvement and without consulting them or me.
Obviously, this is a serious breach of CQ's journalistic standards and will not be countenanced. I've spoken with Bob Merry, who is on vacation this week, and he agrees with my assessment. Please refer all outside queries about this directly to me.