Comments

1
Wait, journalists have standards?

Who knew?
2

It's sad that "Copying language directly from other news organizations" violates standards but copying directly from press releases, be they governmental or industrial, is A-ok.
3
You may call bullshit on not trusting the NYT b/c of their plagiarism problems, but don't worry, there's plenty of other reasons the NYT can't be trusted (after all, they intentionally hired William "Every Word Out of My Mouth for the Last 20 Years Has Been Completely Wrong" Kristol, for gods' sake!)
4
Well if the loony left and rabid right both hate the NYT, you know they must be doing something right.
5
What I don't understand, is that with all the services around to help find copyright infringement on the web (copyscape, Tynt, etc) why don't major newspapers (especially ones like the NYT where plagerism complaints are especially noteworthy and troubling) why don't use tools to find plagerism in works they have not yet published. If they find any, then it is unlikely that the already published entry copied them.
6
That's interesting! All of it. Thank you for that.

You know, there's a novelist named Hank *Searls* whose awesome daughter lives in Seattle.
7

This is a real indictment of Google's primitive technology, which I define as "content aggregation" not "knowledge search" or anything of the sort.

It basically sniffs out words using Boolean logic but ultimately the human makes the choices of what matches his answer to a question.

Zero semantic understanding from Google and the other aggregators.
8
@7: True. If Microsoft can ever make Bing work in a semi-intelligent way, they will school Google on their home turf.
9
...I committed the same crime...?

"... I made it up. I committed the same crime against them that they'd committed against all those other people. Then, the following week in The Stranger, Savage printed a correction, which he plagiarized from the New York Times correction about Jayson Blair."

I am missing something.
Why?
An experiment?
To prove what?

Please explain.
10
No need to play the google ""'s game to find where you are being copied. There are sites that will find your content online for you. Attributor.com is one of them with a free service for bloggers.
11
Plagiarism is the DUI of the written word. It's considered a vile and reprehensible act, but everyone will do it eventually, and usually by accident or negligence.

Every tidbit of knowledge or information you have in your head has been gleaned from somebody else, who in turn got it from someone else, and so on. Therefore, every sentence you type or spew from your pie-hole must be followed by a citation that includes every human that has ever lived, or you are a plagiarist and you deserve to die.
12
As most good writers are also avid readers, listeners and observers, they will inevitably incorporate the words, works and ideas of others into their own.

We should prove ourselves more than litigious imbeciles by giving evidence to our understanding of the difference between outright theft and mutual influence.

Copyright 2010 Mine! Mine! Mine!, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
13
"...running sentences in quotation marks through Google won't necessarily find anything because of the magic of tiny alterations..."


Actually Google is quite good at ignoring those tiny alterations. Try it yourself. I took a quote from your post, changed, deleted and added a few words in various combinations (all in quotes) and it came up with your post as the first suggested link every time.

That said, anyone who thinks it's realistic to run every word of every story in a daily newspaper through a plagiarism checker has never worked for a daily newspaper.
14
Chris

The only thing worse than a plagiarist is a liar.

Rick Bragg never plagiarized anything.

If he had, he would have been fired. He was suspended for two weeks for not crediting a stringer. In other words he violated a a NYT policy that never existed.

One has to wonder why you're so quick to accuse.

Jealousy perhaps?

Bragg is a best selling author and teacher at the University of Alabama and he's doing just fine thank you very much. And so damn happy that he's no longer works in a dying industry.

You, on the other hand, write for a weekly rag no one reads outside of Seattle.

Congratulations!
15
Yes, I agree that plagiarism is fiendishly tough to spot unless one is the person who's been plagiarized. What are you going to do—use Google (as a verb) every sentence a writer turns in?

Please wait...

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