Everett Herald says sports columnist lifted passages from SI

FROM ROMENESKO:

An apology to readers

Posted at 12:01 am

On June 3, this newspaper carried a column describing the travails of a girls’ basketball coach. Editors are deeply disturbed to learn that parts of the column were taken from a 2002 piece that appeared in Sports Illustrated.

This deception violates The Herald’s commitment to earning and maintaining community trust. It also violates journalistic standards: It is never acceptable to take credit for work that is not our own. We must be forthright about the matters we report as well as the sources of our information.

Herald sports writer John Sleeper has acknowledged that his column, “Trust Me, Coaching Girls Is a Whole New Ballgame,” included passages borrowed from a column written by Rick Reilly for Sports Illustrated. Sleeper has been placed on suspension pending an in-depth review of the matter.

The Herald has apologized to Reilly for the unauthorized use of his work. We also apologize to our readers and promise to do everything possible to prevent this kind of failure in the future.


Neal Pattison
Executive Editor

 

Wow.

The in-depth review could last about 10 minutes.

The bright lining is that Reilly's stuff is good enough to be remembered for years.

 

I didn't see anything about the columnist being fired.

Not that it is ever OK, but how fucking stupid do you have to be to plagiarize the most popular columnist in the country?

 

Pretty stupid. There's no way he keeps his job, right?

 

I've always wondered why people think they can get away with plagiarism. In this day and age, all it takes is a quick e-mail from a reader who thought a paragraph sounded familiar and did an even quicker Google search to confirm it.

 

I've often wondered how a writer that does this can go home and be able to sleep at night. I mean, if I lifted someone's work, I'd be sitting at home after deadline in a cold sweat all night wondering if my boss would find out.

You gotta have balls as big as church bells and a brain the size of a fingernail clipping to think you can get away with this.

 

I know people who have kept their jobs for worse infractions, but that's usually at a union paper.

 

Can you define "worse infractions"?

 

A column from 2002? Did it take him six years to find the right words to use?

 

Putting their byline on something that was 100 percent written by someone else.

 

Yeah, that would be worse.

 

Talk about empty promises. What could he or anyone have possibly done to prevent it this time? If neither he nor his desk guys had read (or remembered) the Reilly column, what else might have tipped them off that it was plagiarized?