Ron Borges - Plagiarist?

henry hecht is an unabashed plagiarism apologist.

 

He's suspended for two months

http://www.thephoenix.com/medialog/

 

wow. i, for one, couldn't afford two months w/o pay in my paycheck-to-paycheck world. best to ron through this.

 

too bad, evil. he wasn't fired.
he keeps his job - pays his bills - supports his family.
must be a bitter pill for you.
ah well, you can come out at the next full moon.

 

henry - I'm surprised. Two months for basically the same offense Ken Powers was fired for (and Powers was at the Telegram longer than Borges was at the Globe).

Sure Powers worked for the Worcester Telegram and not the Globe but they are both owned by the New York Times. I feel bad for Ken Powers not for Borges.

Contrary to what Joe Sullivan said - I guess the message the Globe is trying to send is that they will tolerate plagiarism. As I said before Powers was fired while Borges gets a slap on the wrist plus the Worcester Telegram immediately pulled the questionable article by Powers whereas the Globe still has the "stolen goods" up on their website where they are profiting from the ad clicks from folks curious to see what the to-do was all about. Probably the most viewed Borges piece in months. I wonder if the Globe will return the ad money to advertisers who are now inadvertently associated with a thief. Somehow I doubt the Globe does any such thing (they'll probably try and figure a way to charge more).

 

Notes "networks" are a relic of the pre-Internet era that should disappear ASAP.

If a reporter can't do his or her own reporting for a lead note (i.e. line up an actual interview), then gather info for the rest of a national column from his or her own league sources and/or summerize (and attribute) stuff from the other papers and team websites (many of which now put extensive press conference transcripts on their sites), then that reporter shouldn't be writing a national notebook.

 

Having never covered a national beat and being a bit unlearned on how things work, what exactly are "notes networks?" I haven't come across this before.

 

BOB SLYDELL
So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and
you bring them down to the software engineers?

TOM
That, that's right.

BOB PORTER
Well, then I gotta ask, then why can't the customers just take the
specifications directly to the software people, huh?








A guy I used to work with threw that out in a staff meeting when we talked about getting material off the Internet. His point, of course, was readers can do this too.

Notes networks are indeed from a time when an NFL fan in Atlanta had no regular access to the newspapers in other NFL cities. I'd caution against too much reliance on Internet sites too, because readers have the same access.

Give them something they don't have. That, it goes without saying, isn't easy to do nowadays, especially not if you're a national writer. But nobody said this would be easy.

 

i agree 100 percent. the notes networks of yore are no longer necessary. folks putting notes columns together can glean dot dot dot items just by reading sportspages.com or the red zone.

that said, you still shouldn't lift notes verbatim, obviously.

 

i don't necessarily think every note has to be attributed. the all-encompassing tagline the boston globe and some other papers use is fine, imo. but the info gleaned should at least be written by the author, not lifted verbatim.

 

Elliotte,

I think there's some misunderstanding on the terminology. The "notes networks" I and the other posters were referring to are set up like this:

NFL beat guy in Atlanta takes the bulk of what he's written for the week and e-mails it to NFL beat guys in 29 other cities. Every other beat guy does the same, and everyone in the network gets everything they need to know about the NFL in their inbox.

But as several people have pointed out, there's no real need for this anymore, because everything is online. And in my experience, the notes networks only give some people an excuse to lift stuff from other writers. It's outdated and unnecessary.