> Maybe "she" deserves a serious wake-up call, but "they" most certainly do not.
Being a two-person operation is probably why they ripped off most if not all of their content.
"Craftier Internet denizens started to research more of Cooks Source's publications, discovering that other articles could be lifted from The Food Network, Martha Stewart, NPR and even Disney."
Did this marketing company forget what happened to Cook's Source when they screwed with the little people? The internet doesn't respond kindly to that type of bullying:
This article raises red flags on the author's credibility. This looks less like a truthful account of a story, and more like a frustrated small company who had a partnership go bad, and are trying to defame their partner.
A whole web site, with linkbait headlines, set up to tell one story? Their about page doesn't even say they are trying to start a discussion... it just rehashes the story. With a few other pages to give a token appearance that they will tell more stories later.
I am sure there was fault on both sides, and I am equally sure the other side would have a vastly different story.
But this whole site sure looks like juvenile vengeance.
"The problem with your prediction is that you assume what she is doing is lowering her integrity, and the criteria you are using to determine this is entirely your own."
I'm going to assume you actually read the article. In that article Ms. Propova espouses to The Guardian the need for journalistic independence, she labels her site 'advertising free" and she uses ads in the form of referral links to support her web site.
When presented with the difference between what she was saying and what she was doing, she dissembles and rationalizes affiliate links as not being advertising. She knows that isn't true, she ran affiliate link farms before she ran this blog [1].
So she is lying. I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't intentionally being a swindler (she may be but this article doesn't provide enough evidence to support that) and by that reasoning I interpreted her actions which were at a lower standard of integrity than her words to The Guardian as 'lowering her integrity.'
You under sell the reality with this comment:
"Comparing the author of a blog who solicits donations as well as uses affiliate links to someone who falsified their employment history and photoshopped their head into pictures with celebrities?"
The integrity issue isn't with here using affiliate links and soliciting donations here, the integrity issue is attempting to create a perception through lying to benefit herself financially. Had she written on her blog, "This blog is funded by donations and from what ever I make from the affiliate links" or had she written "Note that when you buy an item from amazon by clicking the links here it helps to support my blog, I am also supported by generous donations from people like you." Or something similar, that would be clear. But it would also result in fewer donations which would cut into her income stream. She seems to have demonstrated that with the whole banner-free / non-ads switcheroo and back again. The integrity issue is that she is lying to get more money.
And what did Shirly Hornstein do? She lied about who she knew or who she could make introductions to. Why? Because people who believed that lie did things for her, and helped support her in a lifestyle she believed she deserved. Back before Shirly was photoshopping herself into candid snapshots she was just telling a few white lies to get past the barriers. If you compared her actions then, with Ms. Popova you would be hard pressed to see any difference in the 'level' of integrity loss.
And that was my point, it starts small, it gets out of hand, and it ruins people. Did you watch the interview Lance Armstrong did with Barbara Walters? Did you see why he cheated? How he rationalized his need to "get healthy" and how "others were doing it."
Did you not hear the same plot points in his story? Did you not see his own self belief that it all started out so innocently? Did you listen to any of the testimony on the steroids scandal before Congress? Story after story after story, "It was a small thing" followed by "just one more time" followed by "I had to keep up" followed by "it ruined my life."
Then there was this point:
"Comparing a blog author using affiliate links to a truck driver abusing drugs or an athlete using steroids is pretty sensationalist."
I'm not sure we'll agree here but that is ok, I see the same story in all of them, whether or not you read about it or hear about it depends on your relationship to the people in the story and their relative visibility, but that doesn't make it a different story. Lots of people cheat on their spouses because they are enthralled by an engaging and attractive person, happens all the time, and it happened to General Petraeous. The latter was a "big scandal" because he was the Directory of the CIA, but the story? He let his dick call the shots. That isn't sensationalism, its just sad.
"a truck driver abusing cocaine is driving impaired and doing something incredibly illegal."
I take if you've never used cocaine, it doesn't impair you like alcohol or marijuana might. When I was going to school it was a problem on a par with illicit ADHD drugs today and for much the same reason. I knew several people who used it regularly to keep their energy level up and their concentration sharp, unless you knew they were using you would just think they were smart and quick witted with boundless energy. These days [2] Truck drivers would probably stick with Red Bull or over the counter drugs to avoid tripping up on a drug test.
[2] "In the 1980s the administration of President Ronald Reagan proposed to put an end to drug abuse in the trucking industry by means of the then-recently developed technique of urinalysis, with his signing of Executive Order 12564, requiring regular random drug testing of all truck drivers nationwide, as well as employees of other DOT-regulated industries specified in the order, though considerations had to be made concerning the effects of an excessively rapid implementation of the measure." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_driver#Truck_driver_probl...
(1) I object to the use of the term "stole" - there is no indication that the Forbes blogger did anything unethical. She gave links and full attribution to the NYT article and therefore helped to promote it. YES, the quotes from it are more extensive and lengthy than you would normally see but on the other hand it IS a NINE page article so I am pretty sure the excerpts still falls under Fair Use.
(2) The article in question is a feature article in the NYT Sunday magazine which is where they put the long in-depth articles which took months to investigate. These are meant to be Pulitzer Prize level pieces that will get people talking and make a big splash in the news cycle. This explains both the length and the title. There is NO WAY the NYT Sunday Magazine is going to lead with a sensationalist headline like “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.“ That smacks of The National Enquirer or something. The title they actually used (“How Companies Learn Your Secrets“) is not THAT bad either - it got me to click on it when I saw it.
(3) Most importantly, I don't see how Facebook Likes can be the sole metric of an article's "success." This weeks NYT Sunday Magazine is just officially coming out today. This is a front page article. Lots of people are going to be reading,talking and emailing it all week. And when they do they are going to send the link to the source and NYT will get the credit.
(4) Lastly, - no evidence is given that the TITLE was the SOLE reason why the Forbes post went viral. It is an interesting topic and the Forbes blogger adequately summarized it, making the post very "shareable." The promotion and SEO strategies of Forbes may also have helped.
So in summary the Forbes blog and the NYT magazine are very different types of publications and it looks like they both succeeded in what they were trying to do.
1. TNW originally did not credit the source blog at all. And it wasn't a summary — the piece was literally just a short intro and then his exact words taken without any acknowledgement.
2. After this was brought to TNW's attention, they silently slipped in a link to the source blog, but still copied his post almost word-for-word without indicating that it was a quote. They also refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing and basically told the guy whose copyright they infringed to stop being a drama queen.
That is way beyond the standard rewriting that most big blogs and newspapers do. Look at the Verge and Fast Company articles you linked and see how much of the text outside quotes is copied verbatim from one to the other — in TNW's article, aside from the intro paragraph, it was pretty close to 100%.
That said, the website is legitimate. They’ve put out a lot of very good content, for years, albeit with a pessimistic slant. The firm founder is also active on Twitter.
It didn't last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332918 (7 months ago). It's the exact same story, except the victim there got his story published at a major photography site and roused enough rabble that KitSplit ended up reimbursing him for the low low cost of an endorsement at the end.
I mean, okay, so at least the editor and the writer for this article can be sort of credited with promoting discussion of some paper thin lip service, but what about including AOL as part of their list of villains in this narrative.
...or at least offer a "full disclosure" disclaimer at the end of the article, right?
Obviously the same goes for huffington post articles, since they were absorbed by AOL too, after all.
'A single article, quoting sources, and even giving the founder a chance to respond right in the article itself, is not "internet vigilantism".'
Yes, it is. This isn't meticulously researched. This is not a 60 Minutes exposé. Did Anthony do any fact checking? Did he spend time researching the company and verifying these people's stories?
No, he wrote an article in the Fox News style. Who needs fact-checking when you can just get people from two opposing camps to contradict each other?
It was gossip. It worked. It's no better than an article about how such-and-such celebrity yelled at a waitress and made her cry.
'In your books, me blogging about a terrible previous employer is "vigilantism".'
Again, yes, by definition.
If you put your name to it I'd think it was distasteful and a little petty, assuming we're talking about bad management and not something criminal.
If you didn't, I'd think you were a coward.
(This is my last response, so you can have the last word if you care to.)
> "Media accusations of moral corruption couldn't be better for a business like that as it will make the demographic they are seeking aware of the site."
In fact, I dare say that this company will likely be disappointed if they don't get the media huffy.
> Also, 'patio11 is one of HN's most valued contributors...
I'm guessing "kalzumeus.com" and/or "zeeshanm" is "'patio11", but I'm not plugged into the community enough to recognize this august citizen. The article reads like a sleazy, low-grade sales pitch, so I don't see why it deserves any particular respect.
"You can't even play devils advocate on this one."
Very insightful comment. I don't think they should delete it at this point though which would be covering up what they did at this point.
As far as what to do about this, word for word plagiarism that is barely altered so that it's technically not an exact word search isn't a mistake or momentary slip up by a paid author/journalist/blogger, it's overt plagiarism and fraud. There is absolutely no other thing to be done when it is found but to openly and publicly FIRE the fake "author" who stole another person's work, and issue a public apology to the true author.
That would have resolved it and enabled this company to save face and appear on the up and up.
The handling by the CEO was so abysmal and so wrong here though that it destroyed the entire reputation of the site. His continuing to trying to spin and lie is just an embarrassment to himself, his reputation is ruined.
As far as whoever owns this company, at this point the only thing they could possibly do to recover at all is to fire both the CEO and the plagiarist and issue a public, heartfelt, sincere apology.
I did see it, however it seems to be just speculation about what is happening. I don't want to base all my opinion on that. Some of these are rather heavy accusations, like the nepotism between Steve Klabnik and Ashley Williams, or that Steve Klabnik smeared Amazon because they didn't give Ashley Williams a job. I don't want to give them weight when the only source seems to be a pseudonymous post.
This is a story from TheNextWeb. Isn't that the same outfit that has been recently exposed for Plagiarism: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972651 while their CEO defended their behavior?
The story made it to the top of HN and earned an insane number of upvotes.
Is our memory really that short? Do we trust this story? Do we even want to read it?
If a clearly identified real person or long-standing HN pseudonym were saying this, the accusations might have been worth reading. From a throwaway, they are smears attempting to besmirch the reputation of a firm in a competitive market. Not even wrong, and not worth reading.
[EDIT:] ...and since the throwaway-maker has a number of real accounts, pointing this out is instant downvotes...
I can't say I disagree. They displayed some pretty aggressive, and possibly unethical tactics here. But honestly, I don't much care about their account (as it seems to be inaccurate). I do care about LivingSocial's account, which is interesting to me, and paints pretty much the same picture.
Being a two-person operation is probably why they ripped off most if not all of their content.
"Craftier Internet denizens started to research more of Cooks Source's publications, discovering that other articles could be lifted from The Food Network, Martha Stewart, NPR and even Disney."
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/299928
Not just articles, but also photos, discovered with TinEye.
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