Paging Lynn Hoppes ...

Instead of targeting the bloggers, most of whom came into the .com with strong writing chops (speaking mostly of the NFL guys here, because they're the only ones I pay much attention to), I'd aim my fire at the "entertainment" side of the WWL. The style-over-substance gang rules the roost in Bristol, which makes me sick for my friends there who actually try to commit journalism.

 

Plagerism is plagerism be it in a blog, term paper, news report. He has no excuse.

 

Plagiarism, even.

 

Substitute the word arson for jaywalking, and see what you have.

There are no shades of gray on plagiarism.

You do it, you're fired.

Period.

 

Anyone really charged up about it can submit an inquiry to the ombudsman.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?id=2826900

Not that it will do any good, but if they get a few hundred people asking why plagiarism is being treated as "lazy journalism" and allowed to happen, it may at least be an inconvenience for them.

 

I was typin 2 fast. thanks

 

But still not an excuse.

 

I totally agree.

 

For the second time in this thread, I don't want to come off as defending the guy (and I'm caucasian...who knew?), but I'll tell you why that sentence is wrong.

Because IMO, plagiarism where someone's work is being stolen is decidedly worse than cutting and pasting boilerplate passages where there was no real "work" done. Again, these were a bunch of facts that could have been written up any which way. Hoppes did it the lazy way, pilfering largely or totally verbatim. If Hoppes stole every single "fact" from Wikipedia but changed the wording enough so that it wasn't so easily recognizable, no one would have noticed or cared.

Look at it this way...the Wikipedia author(s) "stole" those same facts from somewhere else...maybe verbatim for all we know.

Stealing facts is not the same as stealing ideas or quotes. There are indeed shades of gray.

 

This shades of gray talk isn't nearly as titillating as I was led to believe.

 

Maybe there aren't enough of them.

 

A former APSE president still shouldn't have a job in the industry for copying and pasting. The lack of a statement speaks volumes about the organization. It's just a glorified and more expensive SPJ.com meet-up if the board doesn't condemn Hoppes.