Writer plans to sue newspaper for its use of his interview

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The Daily Record published an interesting article today in which a Rangers footballer, Sébastien Faure, “hit out at the stricken club and its fans.”

It carried many direct quotes from the French player in which he aired his grievances about being omitted from the team, criticised his teammates’ diet, objected to fans booing during matches and praised the outgoing manager Ally McCoist.

So well done to reporter Steve Goodman for obtaining (especially by current British footballing standards) a revealing interview. But... and it’s a big but...

It was not the scoop it purported to be because Goodman’s piece had been lifted entirely from a French football website, Hat-Trick. All the quotes were contained in a Q&A interview with Faure by the site’s owner, the enterprising French journalist Romain Molina.

There was no attribution to him or his website. Indeed, it would appear to any reader as if Faure had spoken to Goodman. Now an angry Molina is planning to sue the Record.

After seeing the Record piece, he tweeted to the paper: “Can you explain me why my interview with Sébastien Faure became your interview?”

He says he received no reply from the paper despite contacting them several times. But his tweet did elicit a series of dismissive and sarcastic responses from the Record’s senior football writer, Keith Jackson.

He referred to Molina as a “drama queen” and thought his complaint “a pathetic overreaction”. He followed up by tweeting that if Molina “has his knickers in a twist then he should take it up with Steve Goodman.”

Jackson then pointed out that Goodman is a freelance, based in England, who “regularly translates articles in foreign papers and submits to UK papers.”

But that hardly excuses him failing to credit Molina and revealing the provenance of the interview. You can read the original, in French, here to compare the two versions.

Molina also manages a blog about British football for L’Equipe (www.kickoff.blogs.lequipe.fr) and says the Faure incident is not an isolated example of the Record “borrowing” his pieces. He cites his interview of Tony Andreu last year (see Record piece here and Molina’s piece, two days’ earlier, here).

By the way, according to Google Translate, the French for plagiarism is plagiat. It’s a good resource for translating single words but, after reading Goodman’s re-working of Molina’s original, it is possible he may also have used it.

Molina agrees: “The worst thing of this story is the translation”, he tweeted. “Don’t tell me you used Google Translate mister Steve Goodman... It’s crazy.”

It’s a sad episode that, incidentally, reminded me of this blogpost in August 2013 about Jackson’s reporting of Rangers.