By Larry Felton Johnson

This afternoon, I received an email that no editor or publisher ever wants to receive.

The publisher of the Times-Journal organization, which publishes the Marietta Daily Journal and other local newspapers, informed me that an article I’d published by a journalism student included photos actually taken by a staff photographer at the MDJ. The email also called the article “eerily similar” to the MDJ’s own coverage of the event.

I fired off a rapid apology and took the article down. Determining plagiarism of text might be tricky (and I’m looking at that carefully now), but determining that the photos were from the MDJ was not tricky at all. It took all of ten seconds.

There are several ethical and legal rules regarding using copyrighted photos without licensing agreements and permission. Publishing the photos was clearly both a breach of ethics (on the part of the student) and a legal breach (on my part for posting them on the site, even though it was inadvertent).

The student and I have parted ways after an email exchange, and I’m only going to answer for myself here.

I thought the student had taken the photos. But I didn’t do the easy and sensible thing, which was to do an image search before adding the images to the article.

The MDJ was extremely nice about this. There are copyright trolls out there who find licensed photos on sites, and shake down the website owner, often successfully and often for considerable cash. As a consequence, I’m usually very careful about the use of images and tend to use only photos I or my established freelancers took, photos clearly in the public domain, photos from press releases where the copyright holder grants permission, and images we generate using graphic or AI tools where we have clear licensing agreements.

But in this case, I got sloppy.

Moving forward, I plan to double down on image verification and plagiarism checks.

But why do I think making this mea culpa publically is important?

I was trained in a culture that placed emphasis on correcting errors as quickly as possible and as prominently as possible.

Since the article in question was removed, I can’t include a notice in the article itself, so I’m doing it in a separate article.

So I extend my apology to the MDJ, and to the MDJ staff photographer whose photos were published on this site without permission or acknowledgement.