An article published in December 2016 that helped a team of New York Times reporters win a 2017 Pulitzer Prize drew a great deal of content from an independent Russian news site based in Latvia, bringing up thorny questions about how media giants capitalize on the work of local outlets.
The story by Andrew E. Kramer was one piece in a series about Russia that brought the Times the Pulitzer, but it "spells out the same narrative" as an article in the news website Meduza, according to BuzzFeed News. Kramer's article focused on Aleksandr Vyarya, a computer programmer who fled Russia after refusing a government hacking job and whose experience was recounted in September 2015 by Meduza reporter Daniil Turovsky.
"The only thing which really makes me angry is that he [Kramer] got this Pulitzer Prize," Ivan Kolpakov, the editor-in-chief of Meduza, told BuzzFeed. "It was our exclusive reporting on Aleksandr Vyarya."
The Times disputes Meduza's claim on the story, although Kramer got into contact with Vyarya through Turovsky, the writer of the original story. Journalists from Meduza said that Kramer's article "was based primarily" on two of their stories, only one of which received attribution in the Times. The other was "about Russia's broader efforts which also references Vyarya," BuzzFeed reported.
The Times performed two internal reviews and concluded that its limited attribution was appropriate because Kramer independently verified the facts of the story. A key quote Kramer used in his article originally came from Meduza, which Kramer confirmed with Vyarya.
In Turovsky's article, Vyarya was quoted telling an executive at a Russian military contracting firm, "No, excuse me, I am not a hacker. This is against my principles, and illegal." Kramer used almost those exact words in his story, as received in an email from Vyarya, without giving attribution to Meduza.
Kramer quoted Vyarya saying, "Sorry, I can't. This is against my principles—and illegal," which he got in response to a request to verify the similar quote in Meduza.
Later in his article, Kramer offered a general attribution to Meduza for first reporting on Russian recruitment of hackers, but Meduza still raised issues with the Times story.
The Times maintains that its reporting was independent, although Vyarya himself said that he supports Meduza in the conflict between the two publications. The Times' deputy international editor, Greg Winter, said that Kramer had to do his own reporting to complete his article.
"Andrew [Kramer] individually reported or confirmed every fact in the story, often by multiple sources, so we decided that the best approach was to give a blanket credit to Meduza in order to make it clear to readers that Meduza was the first organization to document the recruitment effort," Winter told BuzzFeed.
"There were quite a few places where the account given by Vyarya, his boss, and others in the story differed, sometimes slightly and sometimes substantially, from the Meduza version," he added, specifically mentioning the slightly different quotation of Vyarya that Kramer used.
Kolpakov said that the Times should have referred to Turovsky's original interview with Vyarya. Edward Wasserman, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken Meduza's side.
"I think there is an obligation to come clean, particularly when you have market dominant publications like the Times concealing the enterprising work done by lesser publications that none of us have heard of," Wasserman told BuzzFeed.
To Meduza's journalists, this saga demonstrates how major outlets depend on local press without giving them credit.
"This is the story—about attitude," Kolpakov said. "This is a story about how the most important and most respectable media in the world thinks about regional, local press."
Turovsky posted on Facebook that Kramer's story was "his New York Times debut," and Kramer responded directly to defend his work.
"Our story included reporting not in the Meduza articles, in particular concerning prison recruitment," Kramer wrote. "Specifically and importantly our article explicitly said that Meduza 'first disclosed the recruitment effort' and included a link."
Kolpakov said that the Times story drew too much from Meduza to reasonably justify presenting the article as original.
BuzzFeed noted that the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Mike Pride, declined to comment on the matter.