Interesting plagiarism case

Fact: Fuell resigned from a newspaper in Baltimore just before he went to the Gazette. He resigned several days into a 2-week suspension and investigation into claims of plagiarism. Again, he was taking bylined prep stories from a website and inserting them into his stories. His excuse was that he was confused and thought they were press releases. One mistake is bad enough, but can be forgiven. But there IS a pattern here and that pattern is dishonesty and disrespect to his fellow colleagues.

 

No one's condoning what he did. I don't think he belongs in the profession. As I said on the first thread, what he did hurts the industry.

My only concern has been that the rest of us act like professionals.

 

Like others, I just hope this thread gets Fuell's name out there and prevents him from getting another job. If he hadn't been the ultimate f-tard and actually had gotten original quotes, he likely would not have been caught in this case. Assuming he got better at plagiarizing as time went along, he could have landed a job at a much bigger paper, potentially taking a good job away from someone who deserved it.

I'd just like to know, given his resignation from a Baltimore-area paper for plagiarism, how he was even hired at the Virginia Gazette. Did he lie on his resume? Does claim to have a degree; if so, does he actually have one?

What actually goes through someone's mind when they decide to completely steal the work of another writer?

 

Bringing this back to the top, a later story in the Virginia Gazette said an investigation found 58 new incidents of plagiarism of news releases and isolated paragraphs by Fuell.

The story said the paper checked his 400 bylined stories in the year he worked for the Gazette. Of the 58, 35 were news releases printed in whole or in part.There were 16 from various newspapers and the remaining were from various websites, including Wikipedia, Softpedia, Yahoo! and others.

With the original three cases reported in the first story, that makes 61 in all. And that's at a twice-weekly paper which would have published a little more than 100 issues in the time he was there.

 

[blue]Maybe ESPN will hire him?

 

Covering state wrestling in 2006, I found some facts about a local kid that no one else had - not the other local papers, not the only big one in the state. I used it in the lede, blah blah blah, story came out OK.
One week later, major newspaper in the state has it's big columnist write his weekend bullet column. In the column is info from my lede. No attribution. It wasn't commonly known facts.
I called him on it. He said he heard it from someone else down in the area - who had read it in my story.
Is that plagiarism?

 

Because of this dude, we're losing our desk guy (who used to work in W-burg and will be going back there after this week). Thanks, bro.