Remember the Internet-less world? Research, then, meant spending long solitary hours in dank dark libraries, poring over journals for keywords that would lead to that certain information to back up your suppositions.

Scribbled notes on scrap paper; citations on catalogue cards - all easily misplaced and misfiled. Today, we simply use Google for ideas and intelligence, facts and fiction, sounds and images. Copy, paste and save for back-up.

The Internet has so permeated daily life, work and play that 'googling' and 'blogging' have acquired lexical status.

The Internet is an indispensable tool for researchers and professional writers. But, has it necessarily enhanced research quality and journalistic originality? We know sophisticated software has exposed increasing cases of textual thievery and story fabrication. Here lies the irony of the Internet.

While it has become easier to access as broad an information field as we can today, it has also become more difficult to claim 'originality' in one's work. There's always someone out there who writes better, and sound cleverer.

As a research tool, the Internet is only as good as its users. In the hands of careless writers with ideas deficit, it's very tempting to take the desperate road - trawl cyberspace for related stories and relevant ideas. There lie the pitfalls for the careless journalist who is always working to tight deadlines, whose text is expected to be all engaging, enlightening and entertaining.

Readers today expect more than ever from journalists. 'Hey, I've read that somewhere before! The sentences are so familiar!' - these are utterances that those who write for a living and live by their intellectual integrity dread to hear.

'I thought I attributed those sentences to the original source. No, I did not copy. I only adapted the idea to my story. The similarities are purely co-incidental.' Sorry, the excuse cuts no ice with unforgiving readers.

Tag for life

Last week's reactions to the chance expos of somewhat identical texts in Brendan Pereira's and Mitch Albom's columns showed how merciless readers can be. When they feel let down by writers they respect, their angst is understandable. More so, if the writer is an editor who could have made a difference to the standards of local journalism and depth of media discourse.

To be fair, the copy-paste mode of on-screen writing for a public audience is as old as those days when journalists spent dreary hours in the 'morgue' poring over musty old news clippings haphazardly filed in yellow manila folders. Then, it was read-and-scribble, word for word on scraps of paper. Now, it's a Google copy-and-paste on screen. Different process, same goal.

Journalists are always looking out for fresh angles to an old story - for context, quotable quotes, clever witty phrases, a provocative intro, subtle tones and colourful anecdotes. In the consuming research process and under persistent pressure to look good in print, journalistic slip-ups happen.

A most painful reckoning for journalists is to shoulder the tag 'plagiarist' throughout their working life. This, regardless of whether it was a careless misuse of another writer's narrative and nuance without proper acknowledgment; or a shoddy attempt at lifting other's hard work to make it one's own; or a devious job of elevating one's professional position through dishonest fabrication a la Jayson Blair.

It's said the clever ones copy from the best, and improve on it. One plagiarises up, not down. Which explains why the thought of 'bloggers' plagiarising one another in the cheap talk marketplace doesn't even cross our mind. Who knows if Albom's text was purely - or truly - original?

What we write and publish are often a synthesis of texts and imageries stored in our long-term memory nurtured from the first day we picked up our first novel. That's an amazing data bank for info-retrieval.

Journalists' dilemma

Plausibly, the most significant ethical dilemma facing journalists today is the tussle between speed and accuracy. The time consuming part is not so much the writing, but the research and thinking process. Journalism has always been subjected to time pressures, thus the occasional blanks in the thinking part of journalism.

The criterion of news is that it must relate to recent events. Thus the constant search by journalists for that elusive current news peg. As for peg possibilities, there are countless on the Internet.

With the Internet as commonly used today as the cumbersome Olivetti typewriter in the newsroom in the 1960s, journalism is being driven by time pressures that were previously unknown.

Careless copying or dishonest textual duplication is not new. Just that it's easier to be caught today with many readers playing the text-vigilante all for a good cause: to keep the professional writers honest.

With blog sites relentlessly cropping up on any topic, it's indeed easy to copy the work and wit of the clever blogger. Who knows the extent that politicians, academics, spin doctors and motivational speakers - in trying to make their otherwise pedestrian point to a less widely read, thus, gullible audience - have plagiarised the witty articulation of more gifted writers?

US president George W Bush's ideological arguments to justify his foreign policies and 'war on terrorism' sometimes do sound similar to the defining speeches of past US presidential hawks.

For a speculative commentary on how Bush's ideas are identical to the storyline in George Orwell's 1984, see the article by Daniel Kurtzman in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 28, 2002).

It's only when those in the academy, public office and the media are exposed do we realise the textual deceit so cleverly committed by those whom we least expect to be copycats.

The lesson is: take the idea, but put it in your own words. Which raises an interesting question - how many sentences or words can you lift from another writer's work, without giving due credit, before you qualify to be a plagiarist?