Plagiarism

In 1981, Reuters, AP-DJ and AFP were the only Western correspondents who went to the Bulgarian capital Sofia to cover the annual meeting of the prime ministers of the Comecon countries (remember that Soviet answer to the “Common Market”?). It was a forum for economic policy so my main story was about the economic problems caused by the Solidarnosc strikes in Poland the previous year and how Comecon would not provide any special help for the unruly Poles. 

This story ran at length the next day in four London dailies - the Financial Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. The first three ran it unchanged and bylined it “from our foreign staff” or “from our own correspondent”. The Guardian’s Eastern European specialist rejigged the lead sentence a bit, changed nothing else and proudly bylined it “by Hella Pick”. ■