Updated, 2:27 p.m. PT, April 13th
In a piece titled “How Vox Aggregates,” Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein apologized to Silver.
“Our policy, to our staff, is simple: any time we use work created by someone else, we need clear attribution to the original author and a link back to the source,” he wrote. “When appropriate, we should do more than that: we should add to the conversation with new facts, ideas, or reporting.”
Klein went on to point out that the story Silver was upset about actually did reference FiveThirtyEight, but didn’t link.
The attribution there was clear. The first line reads, “Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight put together this great graphic summarizing the popularity of various key political players and how well-known they are to the general public.”
“But the post didn’t include a link. This was carelessness, not malice, but it’s a violation of Vox’s internal standards. Our policy requires attribution, and any time we fail that policy is inexcusable. It’s a betrayal of what makes the web positive-sum. Silver’s right to be upset by it. He has my apologies.”
Previous:
FiveThirtyEight founder and chart champion Nate Silver went off on Vox.com Monday, accusing the digital news and politics site of lifting his charts without attribution.
Yo, @voxdotcom: Y’all should probably stop stealing people’s charts without proper attribution. You do this all the time, to 538 & others.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2015
Only about 20% of the maps @VoxMaps tweets were actually made by Vox. Always a link to a Vox story, rarely to original source. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2015
Anthony DeRosa, editor-in-chief of Circa, also got into the tussle.
@NateSilver538 @voxdotcom I’ve asked @Max_Fisher about this about dozen times and he never responds cc @ezraklein
— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) April 13, 2015
Vox did not immediately respond to TheWrap‘s request for comment.
