By Kodi Barth

Critics haven’t stopped yelling that Online Journalism would churn out a generation of lazy reporters who claim to bring us all the news, without once leaving their desks. Well, the red lights are beginning to flash here.

On at least three occasions in the last two months, a reader caught in the online edition of our local dailies stories that appeared lifted, almost verbatim, from independent online publications.

Wanjiku Ng’ang’a of the University of Helsinki in Finland wrote to this column yelling foul. Too many articles published in the magazine section of our newspapers and subsequently posted online to a worldwide audience, she said, were duplicates from different sources. On each occasion, journalists falsely passed this out as their own creative writing. And she wondered if this wasn’t one of the gravest sins in journalism.

The writer pointed to “Playing Host,” a story in one our dailies on Nov. 20. This story may have been inspired by "Inviting Ways for Guestrooms”, an Interior Design story published earlier in About.com. But the two stories were strikingly similar. Then, “Spectacular Sights,” a story appearing in another daily on Nov. 27, had uncomfortably striking similarities with “Women's Eyeglass Frames,” a story published online by allaboutvision.com. The same story carried online by “Choosing the right frame for you.” Finally, the same daily ran “How to fight a clean fight” Oct. 3, a replica of “How to have a good argument,” published by hadbag.com.

And Ng’ang’a complained: “I feel that this reflects [badly] on our integrity as a nation.” No one could have said it better. We are dealing with a head-on collision of ethical standards on the Web.

Yet, instances of Internet abuse abound even in places that boast the longest tradition of modern journalism. The New York Times, America’s most authoritative newspaper, last year had to offer a most embarrassing apology after one of its writers was caught in the act.

Jayson Blair was a fledging national reporter with a budget to traverse distant corners of the United States, in the comfort of planes and first-class trains. In his own right, Blair wrote with a flair colleagues would kill for. But one day, like it sadly happens with many of us in this trade, something in him snapped. And trails of similar writing began to creep off the Internet. An investigation ensued. And it turned out that within the stretch in question, Blair had not got into any plane or train at all. He had sat in a hotel room, or God knows where, and produced a mosaic of great writing, doing a copy-and-paste from the Internet.

It’s not the kind of thing anyone wants to write home about. It is a blow to the great tradition of shoe-leather reporting, the practice that has singly characterised journalism for centuries.

Ever since Genesis, journalists always began the news process by hitting the road in a good pair of walking shoes. To authentically present events as they unfolded, journalists in Nairobi would go out and talk – preferably one on one – to a representative body of our community. To climb to the heights of the social pyramid and to burrow beneath its foundations, reporters would find themselves in the filthy alleys of our slums, at money-minting discotheques swarmed by teenagers who've sneaked away from home, and on the buzzing floor of the Nairobi stock exchange. The reporters would become intimate with bloody hospital casualty rooms, grudging police stations, struggling city classrooms and the smelly banks of the Nairobi River. To explain life at the ground level, the journalist must meet Nairobians on their crowded sidewalks, their open-air dining rooms and – for the hundreds of street families in the central business district – their highways and the back alleys. From City Hall to Parliament they’d watch and describe the doings of government business. They’d become skilled in calibrating the promises politicians make against the performances they deliver. They’d stay alert, watching like hawks, all government successes as well as failures.

Journalism calls this reporting. It is a discipline, a second habit, a great tradition that nourishes all shades of information published or broadcasted. It even translates into the more elaborate feature writing and analyses in our magazine writing.

There is no denying it; our journalists proudly pull it off – until a few lazy ones stumble on the Internet.

On the up side, it must be said that the Internet is redefining reporting. It was supposed to save time and to enhance productivity, but the Internet now threatens to spin the entire information gathering process into a farce. The medium’s inherent demand for speed has unfortunately shrunk writers’ and editors’ time for reflection. And the few who choose to go down the less laudable path of plagiarism throw a stench into one of the greatest pillars of journalism – reporting.

The bottom line is that online reporting must not be allowed to kill shoe-leather reporting.