KC Star fires metro columnist for plagiarism

KC Star metro columnist Steve Penn, who's been at the paper for 30 years and has been a columnist for 11 years, was canned after numerous findings of him lifting passages from press releases, funeral parlor releases and other stuff that he didn't write but pretended he did.

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/07/12/3010831/star-dismisses-columnist-penn.html

Maybe he didn't know you're not supposed to do that. Or maybe writing three columns a week was too much work and he had to cut corners. Not sure.

 

Over at Alex Belth's BronxBanter, John Schulian has been presenting an extended memoir of his career. From the latest installment, http://www.bronxbanterblog.com/2011/07/13/from-ali-to-xena-18/, he writes this about columnists while discussing his time at the Chicago Daily News:

"It’s a tough call–maybe an impossible call- to say who was the best of those giants from 20 and 30 years ago. They all had days when they stood atop the world. Royko and Breslin defined the cities they worked in for the rest of the country. Hamill wrote with the eye of the novelist and memoirist he became. Dexter was the most unique; he went way beyond the Philadelphia city limits to the borders of his imagination. Of course he didn’t do it anywhere as near as long as the others. Hamill kept taking side trips, too–to screenwriting, novels, editing–but I never lost the sense of him as a committed newspaperman. Still, it was Royko and Breslin who seemed to capture the most imaginations. For pure writing I’d give the nod to Breslin. But for knowing how to work a column, whether he was raising hell with the first Mayor Daley or making you laugh with his alter ego, Slats Grobnik, or breaking your heart, Royko couldn’t be beat.

And he did it five days a week. Tell that to these limp-dick editors who think a columnist should only write twice a week. Royko didn’t have the privacy of an office at the Daily News, either. He just moved filing cabinets around until they formed a wall around his corner desk. And he’d be at that desk from morning until late at night."

 

What would a metro columnist need to lift from a funeral parlor release?

 

When have you seen a funeral parlor release that had paragraphs worth stealing?

 

He has a column up on Grantland today about Royals Manager Ned Yost.

Nice piece.

 

This is such BS. Who gets fired for lifting something from a press release? Isn't that what that information is for? I would love to read the PR agent who would scream that a reporter stole his work ... LOL!

 

Says... Writer's Block.

 

I don't know... This reeks of the paper looking for a reason to fire him.

 

OK, now that's funny...

 

My point. ...
When you use "Took the Gloryland Express to Heaven?" in a metro column?

 

The lack of proofreading pissed me off. Edgar Yost III is the manager, but he was repeatedly referred to as "Ned."

 

Wasn't Ned his father's nickname?