According to a posting yesterday in the blog
Regret the Error, three newspapers recently lifted, failed to verify, and posted
as news a humorous brief originally written a decade ago by
Randy
Cassingham in his online newsletter
This Is True.
The apparently guilty papers are the
Toronto Star, the
Wisconsin State
Journal, and the
Rocky Mountain News. (Here are the articles from the
Star and
State Journal; the
News' version has been removed at this writing.) The blog noted that
Cassingham "has every right to be upset. All three papers failed their
readers by not checking the wire to verify the story. But the
Star's
infractions are by far the worst. The paper lifted the item and failed to
credit any source. Then it plagiarized."
So, the next time you hear someone make a blanket statement about how
unreliable online media are compared to print newspapers, keep this anecdote
in mind.
So now we're replacing discussion of how to take the...
