Hartford Courant Now Impersonating the Huffington Post

Geez, I thought only low-rent websites did stuff like this.

Newspapers have tried many ways to cover the news with dwindling resources: dropping certain topics, having people do double duty, using more wire service work. Routine plagiarism is not usually an option, but a lawsuit contends that it was for a while at The Hartford Courant.

The Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Conn., has sued The Courant, the state’s largest paper, saying that it copied The Journal Inquirer’s work in articles published last summer, a time when The Courant was also, in a subsequent admission, lifting material from several other northern Connecticut newspapers.

The suit, filed Wednesday in Connecticut Superior Court in Hartford, cites 11 Courant articles it says were largely taken from The Journal Inquirer in August and September, and The Journal Inquirer has cited other examples taken from other papers.

Plagiarism has cropped up as an occasional transgression at many publications, but it is rarely exposed as a regular practice. Calls to executives at The Courant, which is owned by the Tribune Company of Chicago, were not returned.

Online, The Courant credited many if not all of the articles to the original newspapers, Richard P. Weinstein, The Journal Inquirer’s lawyer, said. But in print, the attribution was often dropped, and the byline of a Courant writer was added. The articles were rearranged and rewritten to some extent, but some phrases from the originals remained intact.

The suit addresses only examples when no credit was given to The Journal Inquirer, but Mr. Weinstein said that even with attribution, the extent of copying violated the law. He held out the possibility that the suit could be amended to add more examples.

Mr. Weinstein said that, historically, The Courant was highly respected and was the most important news source in the region, but coming after deep newsroom cuts, the plagiarism “is just a sad, sad comment.”

Lamest 'Correction' Ever

It's bad enough that Maureen Dowd plagiarizes a blog, but when the New York Times goes and runs an alleged correction, they don't even throw the guy a link.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Now it's likely anyone who subjects themselves to the torture of reading Dowd probably also frequents the far left blogs. But the least the Times could do is provide a direct link back to the item in question.

Lame. Very lame.

Seemingly the rest of the blogosphere weighs in here.

Not that Dowd had much credibility, but what little she had is irrevocably shattered. How can she ever be taken seriously when she's lifting material from blogs? I thought blogs were beneath the dignity of these esteemed journalists and their layers upon layers of fact-checking?

Couric Producer Axed for Plagiarism

Another black eye for CBS. As if the troubled Evening News program needed any more, what with the pitiful ratings for the grossly overpaid hack, Katie Couric.

A CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal.

The essay was removed from the CBS Web site and an editor's note was posted saying the item should have credited Jeffrey Zaslow of the Journal, the network said Tuesday.

CBS would not identify the producer fired for the transgression.

The essays are carried regularly on "Couric & Co.," the anchor's blog on the CBS News Web site. Couric and producers meet once a week to decide on topics and the producers write them for Couric to read on camera.

An editor for The Wall Street Journal called CBS News to point out the similarities of the April 4 notebook item to Zaslow's article, headlined "Of the Places You'll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?" The pieces talk about how libraries are seen differently by children from their parents.

Couric's "blog", often written by others, has been a continuous source of amusement in recent months, and ironically enough today, they have one entitled To Be Or Not To Be...Whacked. On the second item linked below, the slobbering over Al Gore was so ridiculous, it produced an avalanche of comments which mysteriously disappeared the next morning.

Previously:

Katie Cheers on the Goracle
Katie Fears Goracle Backlash