Have you seen Ahmer Khokhar?
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Markham Nolan, deputy editor of The Irish Echo in Australia has been detailing the apparent plagiarism of some of his paper’s work by one Ahmer Khokhar.
Khokhar, a freelancer who’s based in Australia, seems to be taking stories from the Irish ex-pat press in the country and pitching them under his own name to Irish-based newspapers such as The Irish Independent. Examples of this plagiarism are available in Markham’s post.
Plagiarism is one of the lowest and cheapest acts any writer can partake in and is in essence theft. A successful plagiarist is basically getting paid for the hard work of others and, as was the case for The Irish Echo’s, it can cause the original writers considerable problems with their contacts too.
Interestingly another journalist/blogger has a piece bigging up Khokhar, but it seems as though he’s been as misled as the papers Khokhar pitches other people’s work to. Khokhar certainly saw a gap in the market, and he figured out the laziest and most amoral way to fill it too.
From what I’ve been told, a number of Irish newspapers are now aware of Khokhar and are rejecting his work on the basis of his previous actions. If in future you see his name in the by-line during your daily paper perusal, maybe you could let those at the Echo know, just in case it’s their work he’s getting paid for.
Going by Rob Steen’s piece, Khokhar is exploiting a similar “niche” in the British press, so any UK-based readers (or even editors, subs or reporters) might want to keep an eye out for him there too.
Just a quick aside; Markham suggests that point 5 and 6 of Rob Steen’s “freelancer’s ten commandments” could be taken as encouragement to plagiarise - I disagree.
Point 5 (Recycle and re-angle stories for different markets, always ensuring every client receives something different) would refer to recycling and re-angling your own stories for different markets. I tried this myself when my piece on IrishElection.com got published in March 2006 - I re-worked it for the ex-pat audience and pitched it to The Irish Echo and its US namesake amongst others.
I can see where Markham is coming from in this, though, as it should probably say “recycle and re-angle your stories for different markets”, but I don’t think someone willing to plagiarise needs to be encouraged and that someone with a conscience needs to have the obvious spelled out to them.
Point 6 (Never kick up a fuss when your copy is rewritten – accept and move on) would refer to editing procedures, I imagine - in other words don’t take it too personally when something is changed or cut by the subs.
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June 29th, 2007 at 11:20 am
The irony of the Indo innocently publishing plagiarised work is fantastic with their track record on such matters.