Blake House

Yesterday Gambit posted a clarifying update on its "Blake Pontchartrain" situation.  The apparent plagiarism episode is quite the little small town morality play. The TV version will have Michael Landon in it.

According to Gambit's  post, they're planning to bring the Blake column back but with a different author from the person who has been "Blake" for the past 15 years.

The column has been written anonymously since its inception, but always by one writer at a time. In a June 17 post on blogofneworleans.com, we used the word “composite” to describe the fact that several writers have produced Blake over the years; that was a poor choice of words. It gave some the idea that several writers within a relatively short period of time, or even all at once, wrote the column. That has never been the case. There has always been only one person writing Blake at any given point in time and, since 1988, only about a half-dozen writers have produced the column — and only one for the past 15 years.

The examples cited by our reader thus can all be attributed to a single contributor, a retired educator whose journalistic efforts have been limited to researching and writing for Blake, anonymously, as a freelancer. This writer’s byline has never appeared in any publication, including Gambit. No other writers and no other publications are affected by the writer’s carelessness or by our decision to remove archived Blake Pontchartrain columns.

We have been assured by the writer that this matter is confined to a few columns. However, after extensive internal discussion and a conversation with a media ethics expert at the nonprofit Poynter Institute for journalism, we have decided that the prudent course of action is to remove the Blake Pontchartrain archive from our website while we review each column for accuracy, originality and proper attribution. This will take time, but we want Blake’s many fans to have full confidence in the column and in Gambit. We will restore each column as soon as we verify its originality.

I know it's just a dinky little Q & A column and I've already kind of said that the "plagiarism" at issue looks more to me like carelessness than dishonesty. After all, readers understand that "Blake" isn't presenting groundbreaking research in this column and is, instead, just going and looking stuff up for people. Still for a "retired educator" this seems like an especially sloppy error.

In any case somebody has to ask this question so it might as well be me.  Strictly speaking, if the column is going to continue to appear under the "Blake" pseudonym and the identity of the dismissed person is never revealed, how do we know that person isn't still writing the column?

We already know how Clancy DuBos feels about anonymity.

Suffice it to say that the prosecutor who masqueraded as the acerbic — and prolific — "Henry L. Mencken1951" in the reader comment sections of nola.com is no H. L. Mencken.   For starters, the real Mencken had the guts, and the integrity, to use his own name.

Shouldn't Clancy's wife's publication hold the retired educator to a similar standard?  Well... probably not exactly that, actually.  If we really are talking about a hobbyist freelancer, we probably don't need to ring the ethics firebell over the equivalent of a few unattributed Wikipedia cut and pastes.

Still, "Blake" should probably just go ahead and come clean anyway.  I'm sure a very large number of people already know this author's identity including, I'm willing to bet, the T-P reporter who "exposed" the plagiarism in the first place. Hard to imagine it won't come out one way or the other.  Especially since we're apparently in the throes of an all out "newspaper war."

That is unless the local journalism back room really does function like an old line Carnival krewe where we all agree to put rivalry aside and keep Comus' name out of the papers like the gentlemen we imagine ourselves to be. In that case, maybe it's more of a newspaper duel.