The ethics of recycling content: Jonah Lehrer accused of self-plagiarism

I reject the concept of self-plagiarism because I believe that people are entitled to use their own works as they see fit, provided that they have not transfered ownership or copyright. Even so, that is beside the point because the issue has nothing to do with plagiarism.

The issue has to do with the violation of the terms of the contract. If the publisher wanted something unoriginal, then they would make an explicit request to publish a previous work. (In other words, the publisher would say to the author, "We want to publish your previous work X. Can we negotiate a price?") When no such request is made and the publisher instead offers to pay the author to write something, it is implied that they want something original. That implicit request is part of the contractual agreement between the author and the publisher. When the author publishes something unoriginal and then takes money for the service of publishing something that is original, then the author has effectively stolen the money.

I don't get why this matters to me, the reader. If he writes well and I learn something, why would I care if he wrote about it before.

How much less of an offense would it be if he took more time to just reword things, even if the same message was kept?

If you're going to re-use your own work and present it to readers, at least acknowledge that you're doing it. This American Life does this well, starting each re-run with a note saying, 'This is a re-run and we are playing it because XYZ'

As a columnist for my college paper, hopelessly past my deadline on a week's column, I recycled (with slight updates) some earlier work I'd first done for another campus paper.

I knew it was a sort of cop out, a disfavored option. But since it was my own work appearing under my own name in a signed opinion/satirical slot, I thought a re-run of some of my better, less-seen work was preferable to offering nothing. I didn't yet realize that 'self-plagiarism' was even a thing. I got the message from the disappointed tsk-tsk look/tone from my editor.

I think it wound up running with a disclaimer about having appeared before elsewhere. Does precise self-attribution cure self-plagiarism?

The title threw me off. When I read self-plagiarism, I read that as using your own work that you already wrote before. Reading into it a little more revealed the catch. He took content he wrote for another publication and used it for his current publication. The issue is: who owns it, the publication or the writer? As the author points out, it comes down to what's in the writer's contract, although I have to agree with the author: even if it was in the writer's contract that he retains copyright over his articles and he is legally permitted to reuse his work for other publications, it just doesn't feel right that he used work someone else paid him to do to finish work his current employer is paying him to do.