This Sunday dated 6th June 2010 my father noticed a good news article in the Hindi newspaper Navbharat Times and bought to our attention. The article was titled " Jewellers par nahin, Hallmark par karen bharosa". It is well intentioned article by all means after all its educating customers and yes whatever they wrote in the article was what we have also been advocating for long. They even used a bangle image to help illustrate the point as shown above.
Except for one thing they broke the fundamental rules of journalism. The image used isn't theirs and they haven't credited the source of the image. The photo was taken by Aditya of Kathana Jewellers around 2 years back. It is used in our website and the blog to illustrate various aspects including "How to identify hallmark jewellery".
They just copied it. Period. We looked for some credit which we should have got after all our website clearly mentions that all the work is copyrighted. We couldn't find any.
The damage has been done atleast on 1 count.They chose to ignore giving the credit where its due. A lot of effort and planning ( even money) goes into conceptualizing and writing articles on this blog. They simply chose to ignore that. On another count they have trashed the ethics book by whom journalists are sworn to.
For us the battle is now finding the editor's contact and getting him to acknowledge the mistake. In any case they will simply issue a small write up tucked in a corner of the paper acknowledging our copyright over the image.
Ethics is not just a byword and especially not in the field of journalism. Where millions of readers can be influenced. Journalists cannot be judgemental in delivering news, nor can they choose to ignore the source of their information. By lifting the content from our website/blog Navbharat Times has set a bad example and we are going to fight it.
1 comment:
Great Blog............
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