Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

Sorry, BTE. He wrote fiction.
If he'd written that they "planned" to be there, he'd have been fine.
He wrote that it happened. He wrote even, the detail that they were wearing MSU gear.
What if they'd showed up as planned but decided to wear Hugo Boss instead of Sparty Green?
He made it up.
You want to call that a shortcut, say using a quote sheet is the same thing, fine.
Your twisted standard can remain your own.

 

Never bleeping ever said it was the "same" thing. Will not waste a nanosecond of my time explaining it again.

 

I understand what you're saying BTExpress: that, sometimes, there are degrees of the use and misuse of materials and opportunities in the course of our jobs.

I also agree that the use of personal judgments and insults unnecessarily colors an argument, often without being applicable to it at all.

But what Albom did was wrong. That's all anyone is really saying. And, whether they may be jealous of his other success or notoriety or not, what I think people are reacting to is the fact that he more or less got away with it, probably as much as anybody could have done in such a "gotcha" kind of situation.

The way to know that, and to get a sense of the degree of the problem, is to ask, 'What would have happened if I'd done that?'

And I know, almost as surely as I know the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that I would have been fired, my journalistic ethics would have been decried, my reputation would have been destroyed, my integrity would have been called into question for the rest of my career, and the condemnation would have been piled on and made as horrible-sounding as possible, probably more for effect in the effort to accomplish my firing than anything else, and nobody would have defended me by saying, 'You know what? The crime wasn't really that bad..."

I certainly would have had no chance of ever receiving a Red Smith award, either.

So, although I very rarely disagree with you about anything, I have to say that I'm with Twoback and others here in condemning both Albom's use of his "creative license," as well as the fact that he continues to receive acclaim and awards in spite of the fact that we now know, without any doubt, that he does use it.

 

Not true. When I accused a member of the Ann Arbor News sports staff, now in PMITAP, of plagairism for lifting several whole paragraphs word for word, without changing so much as a comma, the response to my EE from the EE of the Ann Arbor News was that you can't plagarize stats.
So if Ed said it, it must be so.

 

Didn't Doris Kearns Goodwin win a Pulitzer after confessing to plagiarism charges on an earlier book?

What is happening to America's memory chips?

 

Haven't seen her lately, but there IS a resemblance ...

 

I have no idea what PMITAP is.
Also, on Twitter, don't know what smh is.
Too many abbreviations in this world.
Here's one for Spnited, though: NFL.

 

Think "Office Space"

 

I don't see how there has to be a pattern. For example, if you are doing a column and really need a quote to tie it together and fabricate one from a real or fake person and don't do it all the time, is that a pattern? Is that still wrong.

Also if at rare times you at times spice up a column with little details that you invent, is that a pattern.

I'm just wondering why it takes a pattern to be a dishonest journalist.

 

There's a continuum of shortcuts, and there's a line between what's okay and what's not dissecting it. There may be some tough calls near the line, but what's being discussed here isn't in that grey area.

 

Albom took a chance, and lost. He should have hedged his writing, as has been said. "Scheduled to" can work wonders. So can proper planning.

A couple of years ago, a columnist out west sent his column through with mutiple notes in parentheses, like ("Desk: if the series ends Tuesday, please change this to "were" instead of "are")" and things like that. That columnist happens to have a no-edit policy, and the column ran with notes intact.

So even when you try to cover yourself, it can backfire.

 

That's fantastic.