Journatic, a US company formed to provide community news to large newspapers, was exposed earlier this month for using fake bylines on its stories.
The stories were often written by freelance journalists located outside the US and, once the scandal was discovered, several papers dropped the service.
Ryan Smith provided an excellent insider's insight into Journatic's controversial outsourcing of hyperlocal journalism on this site on 6 July. And he followed up yesterday after the Chicago Tribune's decision to terminate its contract with Journatic.
Its editors realised that at least one story had been plagiarised. Some stories appeared to have been fabricated. Similarly, fake bylined stories were also published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. It transpired that the Houston Chronicle has carried 350 stories with fake bylines since September 2010.
Journatic's chief executive Brad Timpone denied that fake bylines were intentionally used and apologised for what he described as "a mistake". Some mistake!
The company's editorial director, Mike Fourcher, resigned last week, explaining on his own blog that "the founders [of Journatic] and I fundamentally disagree about ethical and management issues as they relate to a successful news business."
But there is a lesson for all publishers and editors in Britain and in other countries where outsourced and remote "content provision" is being introduced to replace story-getting staff journalists.
Commercial shortcuts, by their nature, encourage misbehaviour. Why? First, because the enterprise is all about turning a profit and that requires quantity rather than quality.
Second, because journalism, especially hyperlocal journalism, is essentially a grassroots activity. It is bottom up, not top down.
Journalists located far away from the people they are supposed to serve have no sense of commitment to the communities they are writing about. Self-evidently, they lack local knowledge. So the more remote the journalistic input, the less relevant the journalistic output.
The outsourcing of reporting is qualitatively different from the outsourcing of sub-editing. Reporters need to have contact with people.
Digital technology enables us to do so much that is so good. But it is a misuse of that technology to create "content teams" churning out copy for a media company committed only to making money.
I accept that companies such as Journatic were bound to get found out in the end. In the long term, it makes no sense to fabricate, plagiarise and use fake bylines.
Similar businesses might well counter that it doesn't make commercial sense to trick newspapers. Their success depends on them acting ethically. Fair enough. But, on a regular basis, can a man in Manila really report with any credibility on the problems faced by residents in a Chicago suburb?
Sources: Business Insider/GigaOm/Poynter