Inquirer writer accused of plagiarism

http://deadspin.com/5852117/lazy-hack-philly-newspaper-writer-being-investigated-for-doing-cut+and+paste-job-on-bloggers-report

The post pulls no punches -- its author, Deadspin writer Dom Cosentino, also writes a blog about the Big Five, so he's familiar with Tatum -- but the basics are: Philadelphia Inquirer college basketball writer Kevin Tatum is being accused of copying a blog post nearly verbatim from VUhoops.com, a Villanova fan blog.

Deadspin got hold of John Quinn, Inqy's sports editor, who said the matter was being looked at by staff. It should also be noted that some of the copy-and-paste was from a press release.

 

I imagine he thought he was copy-and-pasting a press release, not a blog entry. And like you said, it appears the blog entry was at least partially a press release anyway.

So easy to cover yourself for these things, though. All it takes is one link. If I'm copying verbatim from a press release, I use a text box to differentiate it from the rest of my words.

 

The plague contiunues to spread from its long-established Boston roots.

Hide your children.

 

The press release stuff always makes me uncomfortable.

Should he have changed the wording? Absolutely... And this by no means justifies it, but holy shit this happens all the time and it kills me to see someone lose their job over somethign like that.

If he plagiarized the blog, he should be done.

 

Looks like he copied the blog. This should be an easy decision...

 

If he copied the blog, how could he be so stupid? Maybe he was just plain lazy.

 

We're talking about this in here; what a sad rep to have in the business, regardless of what this latest is all about.

 

I know this is part of what Deadspin does. But, wow, what an out-and-out attack on a guy...

If any of us ever did this in the course of our jobs, we'd probably be about as gone as Tatum might be.

 

One funny thing about the Deadspin account is the reference to having a 54-word sentence written by the Inquirer guy taped above his desk.

I once wrote a 108-word lead sentence/paragraph that was on display in the Beloit Daily News sports department for a number of years. So good memories there.

 

As an intern I used "It was a dark and stormy night." as my lead. I used it for a couple reasons, as a 20-year-old I thought it was clever because we were in California where there are never dark and stormy nights during the summer and because the tennis match I was covering was delayed several times because of weather and the power going out.

The lead didn't make the paper. Not another word in my story was touched, but the lead was gone. I didn't say anything about it.

The copy chief called me "dark and stormy" for the next two months.

 

He must not have been a Peanuts fan, Charlie Brown.

 

He was a miserable prick. I don't necessarily disagree with the edit, but no writer wants to be reminded of something dumb they did over and over again. I'm guessing all of us don't want to re-live the worst things we've done or written, not that any of them were plagiarism...