Paging Lynn Hoppes ...

I have no such motivation, either. But I would suspect Hoppes would if it were to exonerate him. If he doesn't have the motivation, there's your answer in the other direction.

 

Yes, someone is religiously reading Hoppes stories and, as a public service, updating Wikipedia with basic information gleaned from them. Forgive me if I stop short of cross-checking the edit dates of "Damn Yankees," Tom Chambers and Pam Anderson to shoot this possibility down.

 

In the comments on the Deadspin piece, the writer did say he checked the times on the Wikipedia entries just to make sure it wasn't like that and they were all updated before Hoppes' pieces appeared.

 

Like I said, I wasn't trying to defend Hoppes. I didn't know.

So what it looks like to me is serial plagiarism. How he survives that I have no idea. Then again, I used to work for a guy who was bulletproof and kept stumbling up.

 

I'm sure the ombudsman will weigh in any second now.

 

Inevitable? I disagree completely. That's a cop out. It's like condoning cheating because, well, I just didn't have time to study.

 

Who said I'm condoning plagiarism? What I said was that the demands dictate the behavior. I don't claim to know the specifics of Hoppes' working situation, just not willing to completely dismiss it as a possible factor in why a veteran journalist who ESPN thought was good enough to put in a management role and APSE thought was good enough to make their president went out and lifted copy from Wikipedia or hired Sarah Phillips.

 

Unreasonable demands? So they have to blog and do video sometimes. Their jobs are also easier in so many ways.

If a Washington Post reporter in 1972 wanted to see if McGovern's views on Vietnam changed any from 1968 to 1972, how would he go about finding the quotes he needed? Today, a couple of Google clicks may get you what you need. And chances are you can find the speeches on video to make sure the candidate is quoted accurately.

Editor wants to move that fourth paragraph into the second paragraph and uses his red pen to mark several other changes? Which is quicker, having the reporter retype the story, or a simple cut and paste?

Lazy is lazy.

 

Lazy is not making the extra phone call to get another point of view in your story. Plagiarism is an egregious act that damages the credibility of the reporter and their publication. It used to have serious ramifications, but these days it seems to be treated like maybe barely worse than misspelling a cross country runner in your agate. If nobody cares about a NYT columnist copying and pasting the thoughts of someone else, do we really expect anyone to care if Wikipedia items that easily could have been paraphrased are copy and pasted in blog posts?

 

Caring is too much work.

 

/checking watch/

 

Any second now. I'm just sure of it.