Business Insider & Plagiarism: A Case Study in Unseriousness
Or why more publications should direct some of their passion about plagiarism and insufficient editorial care to their own content.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman was at the forefront of a recent campaign against the now former President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, in part over concerns that she’d plagiarized from other researchers in her papers over the years.
In the aftermath, Business Insider decided to take a look at publications by Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor who just happens to be Bill Ackman’s wife.
I don’t have much to say about any of this directly, as academia’s de facto norms for stylistic citing are beyond my expertise. What is in my wheelhouse though is journalistic plagiarism. And oh boy is it deeply funny to me that Business Insider decided to leap in here.
In what follows I want to break down an example of just how fundamentally unserious they are about both plagiarism and their basic journalistic mission.
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Subscriber note: I left Israel in mid-December, then promptly got COVID. Many of the war-related pieces I was working on are still in the hopper. Though the order and timing of publication is murky as I have a few other big / unrelated pieces in final stages.
What Business Insider Is
As is the vogue for too many business and finance publications, Business Insider can be understood as a rough pyramid:
A narrow top layer of real feature journalism that they often pretend is representative of the whole
A wider supporting layer of clickshare reporting where they clone stories that others have broken, add nothing to them, but re-word them just enough to argue that this isn’t plagiarism
An overall foundation of mill content that they’d be embarrassed of if anyone senior there ever bothered to actually read any of it
While each of the first two layers are worth their own longer treatment, my interest here is the foundation—the volume that helps them maintain scale.
To give the sense, let’s consider an article from a former “Senior Investing Reporter” 1 who managed to publish nearly 400 pieces over roughly 19 months—a pace so outlandish that you can kinda guess what their average quality looked like.
Except no, lol, whatever you’re imagining is not nearly bad enough.
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In August 2020, Business Insider published this banger:
Setting aside the wonky grammar, the use of “famously” to describe something only ever talked about by finance folks and grifters, and the false implication that David Ryan had 11 criteria specifically, my first real objection here is the use of the present tense. These criteria are from 1989, a full 31 years prior to this publication.
As for the article itself:
It’s made up of 27 short paragraphs
Ten of those are fully in the reporter’s own words—ie. aren’t just quotes from an ancient interview given to someone else in a copyrighted book*
Of those ten, six are innocuous transitional paragraphs of a sentence or two
Of the other four—ie. the only real meat not in quotation marks—three were close paraphrases (one of them incorrect2) and one was just straight-up plagiarism
(*Before getting to the plagiarized bit, it’s worth noting that the whole article seems a clear violation of Fair Use copyright exemptions. Even if you source everything carefully, you need to “transform” the original text in some way. Mere summarization is generally only considered fair game when there’s obvious civic value in doing so. If you’re going to cut an original copyrighted source into a smaller shape, add nothing to it, then paywall it, you need to make an awfully strong case re: that civic value. “Here is some expired investment advice from the George Bush Sr. era” is…not that?)
Anyway, the plagiarism. Quoting the article (emphasis mine):
In 1985, the year Ryan won the US Investing Championship in the stock division, he garnered returns of 161%. The following year, he saw another 160% return, scoring him second place in the contest. In 1987, he claimed the top spot in the competition yet again with another triple-digit return.
"For the three years as a whole, his compounded return was a remarkable 1,379 percent," Schwager wrote.
And now the original interview from Schwager’s book:
Ryan … won the 1985 stock division of the U.S. Investing Championship ... His return that year was a phenomenal 161 percent. … Ryan reentered the contest in 1986, virtually duplicating his previous year’s performance with a 160 percent return second-place finish. In 1987, he won the contest once again with another triple-digit return year. For the three years as a whole, his compounded return was a remarkable 1,379 percent.
Note two things here:
The reporter includes a marked quote from the book’s author in such a way as to suggest that the preceding paragraph isn’t also part of the same quote
While some of the borrowed bits are lightly remixed, the killer is the bolded line
Either the reporter didn’t know how to calculate what the third year’s results were (118%) or couldn’t be bothered. Both seem disqualifying to me. If you can’t do that math, how are you a Senior Investments Reporter? And if you can, and if your sole theoretical defense against the charge of plagiarism is just “well, I was just cutting length for the reader”, isn’t “118%” shorter than “another three-digit return”?
Anyway, the issue isn’t that we don’t know what the source is. It’s that we don’t know what is and isn’t just the source. It turns out that the reporter added precisely nothing—apart from two transcription errors. If we don’t count segues, 100% of the article was just a mix of quoting and paraphrasing a single source, where that paraphrasing was done with varying amounts of effort as to obscuring the game.
At its core, plagiarism is two intertwined sins: theft and laziness. The theft part is worse I suppose, in that it denies credit to the person who put in the real work. But this is often enough done in the service of laziness. When you’re posting articles at a rate of just under one per work day (!), you’re going to be awfully tempted to cut some corners. Business Insider is aware of what some of these shortcuts look like. They just choose as institutional policy to not look too closely.
(As a PS to this bit, behold a level of laziness I’d never even conceived of. This is the article’s entire presentation of one of Ryan’s criteria.)
Worse Than Plagiarism
In all that’s been written about plagiarism of late, I feel we’ve put too much attention on the technical aspects of proper citing and not nearly enough on “ok but did the piece at least advance our collective understanding in some useful way?”
When a piece is truly additive, it’s easier to be a bit forgiving about what some argue are just formatting errors. Few pieces are entirely original; most just advance existing work in some incremental way. The larger this increment, the larger the social benefit, and the more leeway I’d be inclined to give—so long as the author isn’t intentional in their obfuscation or dismissive of the shoulders they’re standing upon.
What seems insane to me is that zero paragraphs in this Business Insider article attempt to reconcile the basic fact that technical stock-picking advice from 31 years prior is worse than useless to the modern reader. It isn’t just that nothing is added to Ryan’s thoughts from 1989, it’s that them being FROM 1989 is just never dealt with.
Just how outdated is Ryan’s advice? A few representative examples:
[Criterion] 5. Few shares outstanding
"I am looking for stocks with less than thirty million shares and preferably only five to ten million shares," [Ryan] said.
Apple currently has some 16 billion outstanding shares. Amazon over 10 billion. Microsoft around 7.5 billion. Tesla a little above 3 billion. You get the idea. The logic of share issuance and stock splitting has changed a lot since the 80s.
[Criterion] 6. Institutional ownership
"I would say 1 percent to 20 percent mutual fund sponsorship is the ideal range," [Ryan] said.
Setting aside how insane this range width was even at the time, index funds ate the financial world. If you’re looking for a stock with <20% institutional ownership now, you’re looking almost purely at pink sheets.
The Even Larger Issue
It isn’t even that the median Business Insider article doesn’t seem to see any serious editorial scrutiny (whether it’s paywalled or labelled Premium).3 It’s that Business Insider is heavily in the business of aiding grift.
These outlets are the lifeblood of “experts” like, say, James Altucher, who use friendly coverage and liberal contributor privileges to push schemes that would be understood as at least morally criminal if more financial journalists took learning and writing about them seriously. These outlets are trying to make a sucker out of you—or at best are offering you up as prey to predators like Altucher in exchange for clicks.
It’s not just that the article as it was written couldn’t possible help someone in 2020 improve their investing strategies. It’s that that’s rarely the goal.
Take the underlying book that the reporter cribbed from, 1989’s Market Wizards, which became the first of a series. The author realized that contest winners and their ilk loved to talk about their genius to roughly the same degree that people who suck at math love reading about how to get rich. Why not connect the two?
Is such a book valuable?
If the experts really had unique strategies capable of giving them a reliable edge, their least profitable action would be to give them away.
Experts give inherently conflicting advice, and books / articles that aggregate their tips rarely (perhaps never) help readers adjudicate between them.
The product is just success porn, meant to get you so jacked up on the idea of your soon-coming riches that you don’t think too much about how you’re paying $12.95 a month—or, in Altucher’s case, perhaps a few thousand dollars up front—for a bunch of expired tips and conflicting strategies that do little more than illustrate what survivorship bias means, with most of the underlying risks never spelled out.
Investors whose approaches are still working are out there still using them to print money. But this is extremely difficult to sustain over time, which is why so many try to build guru brands that they can monetize once their luck turns. You can only have your best investing year once. But you can sell newsletters and video libraries and Discord access on the back of your past accomplishments forever. And this is much, much easier to do with the help of popular outlets who don’t care about standards.
Anyway, I’ll close with a disclosure from the reporter’s Business Insider profile:
[Reporter] believes that individual stock-picking will probably do more harm than good to an average investor. [He] primarily invests in a portfolio of low-cost index funds. He also has small positions in [names]. He does not trade often.
Now consider why this disclosure doesn’t appear next to the articles themselves.
You want to get rich? Invest into honing in-demand skills, spend less than you earn, and park 80% of your savings into index funds. You’re welcome. That’ll be $12.95.
I’m not naming them in the piece itself. While any reader can trivially find their name by clicking this or other links in the story, the point in leaving it out is twofold: (a) it’s about the underlying incentives, not any single reporter following them to their natural conclusion, (b) making this pop up when people search their name is a fairly harsh punishment and I try to use it selectively.
The article: “By June 1983, [Ryan’s] account had swelled to $53,000.” Ryan’s actual comment: “Initially, I ran the account up to about $52,000 by June 1983.” If you’re going to slightly rewrite something to avoid either quoting or plagiarism, at least get it right!
Lest you imagine that the wider org was just unaware of the post in question, they reposted it to Twitter later the same day. At least one editor saw it. Did they actually read it? Based on the obvious uncorrected typo and blank section, I’m guessing no. Though it’s not clear to me whether having pushed this after actually reading it or doing so entirely blind is a greater crime against the reading public.