Usually within blogs, I do not being confined to one topic, so as my duty of fulfilling my assignment, I will attempt to incorporate some other thoughts about this week's readings of online effectiveness with my topic, in hopes to further expand the knowledge base of my readers.

My personal thoughts on the role of Journalism includes that it should inform, educate, further expand the thoughts and opinion of its reader, entertain and most importantly, get the facts. With my blog and concept idea, I hope to ultimately educate others on copyright issues and how they can protect their works. It will be a resource for students and researchers because of its attempt to solve a major industry problem, plagarism (See related link for more industry information).

With direct attribution to Wikipedia, plagiarism is defined as: “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object, itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution.”

With the focus of TV online websites being more video-oriented (according to Feedroom CEO Jon Klein), my addition of video feeds to the copy check is in great relation to the rising need within our industry for its safety as well. We can all agree that stories are scooped more readily on the Net. However, the need for more unique content is obvious.

Take for example, my daily work as a freelance writer (see my writing blog for more happenings). Part of my work involves being hired to write content articles about various topics. Because of my experience, I can write about almost anything. However, there was a time where I would need to do surface research before beginning to compose articles. This is similar to that of research for academic writing in universities. We view the research and ultimately, incorporate it with our own voice into our assignments. The new phenomenon however occurs in that someone feels they can lift paragraphs or perhaps even whole texts of article and repost, reproduce and/or reprint them with their byline on them.

Why does this occur?

First of all, I think in general many people are not aware of the extreme legal action that can be taken for doing this.

Dan Brown, writer of The DaVinci Code, was argued of plagiarizing parts of this bestseller. A lawsuit pursued, in which, he won. Details are here.

Secondly, perhaps these individuals were not taught correctly about the act or perhaps they don't see it as a moral issue, simply a large sum of money will fix their problem. The real problem however exists in the written voice of individuals.

As writers, we struggle to establish our own voice that readers can identify with. We all have our favorite journalists or novelists, in which we could read a paragraph or two of the piece and know it was a specific writer composing it without first looking for the byline. This is what makes journalism and writing so intriguing and ultimately fulfilling to me. I do not want my voice passed off as someone else's. My concept idea will work towards fighting for that notion.