'Woody Plaige'

Right. I'm still surprised that at this point the only thing the paper is doing to acknowledge what happened is to add the attribution and put a single sentence at the end of the column. I expected an apology or a clarification. Maybe they think the sentence does that...

 

I love the fact that in Woody's apology, apparently doing your "due diligence" these days means googling someone on the internet and lifting quotes.

What a goofball.

 

Paige ate dog food on TV. Why anyone would pay him any attention, much less care what tripe he excretes is one of the great mysteries of our time.

 

You people get worked up over everything. I had a 1-on-1 interview with Paula Creamer once when she was playing a practice round here. She talked to me about her wrist injury and how it was effecting her. Well, weeks later during the tournament, a writer from a major metro comes up to me and asked me about the quotes.

Lo and behold, there they appear the next day with no attribution whatsoever. None. It bothered me for a while, maybe a year, and then I just realized that I need to get over it. I figure that what goes around comes around and bitching about it isn't going to do anything.

 

It's the Cardinal sin of journalism, and every journalist knows it. There's no gray area.

It's like an MLB player betting on baseball -- you're gone.

A student would get an automatic F for plagiarism and at schools with a strict honor code they'd be expelled.

But Woody Paige should only issue a bull shit apology, admitting only to sloppiness, and everyone should move on.

Bull shit.

If you want your profession to have any respect, you have to stand up for it.

 

I also love how in his "explanation" the reason for the whole mistake is that they had to cut six inches off of his column.

Don't know how Woody takes his whacking but most big-time sports columnists don't just tell the desk to lop off the last six inches.

Most are pretty particular about how long their column is going to be.

 

Stealing quotes is not plagiarism.

It's still stealing and it's still wrong, but it's not plagiarism.

 

I'm not defending him. Both are horrible things that no journalist under any circumstances should do...

 

He didn't just lift the quote.

He set the story up the same way as the SBJ and plugged in the stolen quote. That's plagiarism.

 

If someone stealing your work bothered you for a year, that's 364 days longer than it should have and is enough evidence that what they did is horribly wrong.

 

I guess my problem when I was a sports writer was writing. I should have just lifted material.