I wrote in March that the Swedish Union of Journalists (SJF) called Metro’s editor-in-chief Sakari Pitkänen the “grave-digger of journalism” after initiating a project involving citizen journalists in the Stockholm region. I thought that was a bit tough on Metro, but it seems that the initiative has some quality problems regarding the origin of at least one article. Resumé can today reveal that one citizen journalist in Österåker copied an article from Expressen and published it in Metro with his own byline.
Sakari Pitkänen admits that there has been a copyright infringement and that the original writer Carl V Andersson is entitled to remuneration.
Resumé has a link to the Google cache and the original.
What Resumé fails to discover is that the citizen journalist, who is also a blogger, is a candidate for Vänsterpartiet (v), the leftist party, in Österåker. He is also a member of the board in (v) in Österåker. With that in mind one could question if the purpose of Metro’s citizen journalist project was that politicians would write articles. I think not.
Tags: citizen journalism, plagiarism, media, metro, media.