I don't know why the Straits Times is doing this, but this is not what newspapers are expected to do.
There is an article bylined Timothy Garton Ash "for the Straits Times" today with his impressive resume — he is a professor at Oxford and a senior fellow at Stanford — listed below as a footnote.
Now I see the same article in the Guardian: Here, you can feel the power shift. But we all wrestle with the same problems. The Straits Times simply shortened the headline to "Ideological shifts to power shifts?"
Timothy Garton Ash has long been a Guardian columnist. As his own home page, linked to the Guardian, says:
His weekly column in the Guardian is syndicated in leading newspapers across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He also contributes to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Now if the Straits Times is running the same article as the Guardian, which it is, then it should acknowledge that. That's standard practice.
It matters because getting a top name to write exclusively for you is far more prestigious than publishing his syndicated articles.
I don't see the Straits Times every day, but this is not the first time it has done this. I once came across an article bylined Shashi Tharoor "for the Straits Times". It turned out to be a piece which had already appeared in the Indian newspaper, the Hindu.
I seldom see the Straits Times' sister paper, the New Paper. But recently I bought a copy of the New Paper and saw foreign stories culled from various sources without naming them. This is not how reputable newspapers behave.
I am glad to see the Straits Times running articles by people like Paul Krugman and Timothy Garton Ash. But any news junkie knows they write for publications like the New York Times and the Guardian. When their byline appears with the words, "for the Straits Times", one is likely to check.
Related posts:
