Plagiarism

Nice stories on this subject, and I’m slightly surprised that no one who was in Saigon during the war has yet got in on the act. So I will... 

At the end of any busy day, UK and other “specials” would pour into our small office at 15 Han Thuyen and ask (as has already been quoted) “mind if I have a look at your file?” Upshot usually was that stories that had taken us all day, and often at some risk, to put together would be rejigged and regurgitated in about 20 minutes to be filed by our operator on our wires to the Daily... 

We all knew this was part of the burden the agency reporter has to bear, but eventually Reuters London took notice of our squawks enough to decree that specials could only see the London desk turn-back version of our copy and not the outgoing original. That at least slowed them down a bit!

But my personal classic moment came in Spain in 1992 - the Barcelona Olympics. I had written a substantial but pretty unexciting story on the announcement of the timetable for the athletics events. The story appeared in The (London) Times the next morning, in full, word for word, including one small typo that I and our London desk failed to spot, under the byline of their own sports correspondent (whose blushes I will spare). ■