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Different authors, different articles but essentially the same paragraph

5 points by cudgy ↗ HN
Two Reuters articles are written by different authors, but they have the exact same paragraph (minus some obvious tweaks). Too similar to be coincidence in my opinion.

Why is that? I’d expect there to be a common author. Or are the authors cross-pollinating so much that they all write the same way? Who (or is it an AI) is ACTUALLY writing (or generating) the articles at Reuters?

Below are the paragraphs. Links to articles are in comments below.

Article 1

“Republican President Donald Trump has filed a raft of lawsuits to challenge the results, but electoral officials in states across the country say there has been no evidence of significant fraud, and legal experts say Trump’s efforts are unlikely to succeed.”

Article 2

“Trump has filed a raft of lawsuits to challenge the results, but elections officials in states across the country say there has been no evidence of significant fraud, and legal experts say Trump’s efforts are unlikely to succeed.”

4 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] thread
phillipseamore
Most likely editors have decided that some kind of language like that should be in articles about the election and either the writers are simply paraphrasing it each time or the same editor edited these articles.
afiori
I always assumed that there is a lot of soft plagiarism in news, a lot of articles are essentially "here is some news that this other outlet has already reported" sometimes with long (uncited) chains, it would not surprise me if they were both copying a third source.

(even if the simplest solution is that they had a common editor, or that either or both articles have uncredited authors; my understanding is that uncredited secondary writers are quite common in news)

jfengel
The two authors are pulling similar writing for the background facts for two different articles. It's not as if the two writers discovered this raft of lawsuits independently, or spoke to those election officials themselves.

They may both cribbing from some third article, possibly by a third author. That article is also owned by Reuters, so there's no copyright violation. It's just necessary context to understand what is otherwise approximately three sentences of information that's new in this article. Each writer adapted the original text to fit the style, tone, and pace of their article.

The wire services don't put out a stream of facts. They put out finished news articles, which their subscriber newspapers can run. (It's a fairly novel thing that the public has direct access to the wire services, which predate the Web by a century.) The newspaper editors will pick which articles they want to run, and so each article is expected to contain enough of the story to understand the key facts.

So no, it's not a coincidence, but it's not nefarious. It's the way the wire services work.