The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russell
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The INQUIRER doesn't do plagiarism
ACCUSATIONS have been flying around the web over the past few days that The INQUIRER is guilty of plagiarism, and that as Editor, I enforce this as a policy.
Here's a very quick response to the accusations, for anyone who's been following this saga.
The INQUIRER doesn't plagiarise other sites. All the information in the article in question was based on either an alert sent to us by AMD or told to our reporter by AMD's Jan Guetter during a phone interview, including the references to Nvidia and Via. Feel free to confirm this with AMD. We were unaware of other articles stating the same points until after publication.
We haven't got a list of sites that we steal information from and then deliberately don't link to. Whenever we can't confirm the material ourselves, we link to the originator of the article.
However, I strongly encourage my reporters to talk to the original source as a follow up to any stories they see on the web, rather than just taking the 'facts' from a third party source, whether a competitor of ours or not. This is because I want The INQUIRER's articles to contain facts that we've verified, rather than blindly trusting other sites, and also because I want the writers to talk to as many sources as possible to work towards exclusives rather than just parroting other people's news.
Lots of other technology editors have been happy to use the plagiarism accusation as an opportunity to state how they would never condone such practices, as it's just not ethical journalism. However, nobody has approached me or anyone else at The INQUIRER to ask for a response or confirm whether this is true before stating their thoughts. Surely, isn't that the first rule of journalism?
Author: Madeline Bennett
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I actually meant to do [The Daily Telegraph] straight. Load of rubbish that it is.
You know, if I read a news report at [The Imbiber] that I'm doubtful of, it isn't going to vastly increase my confidence in it just because substantially the same story is running at [The Roisterer]. Or at [GizFreeStuffO] or [HashPot] or [The Dafly Telegraph].
I'd be surprised if news websites didn't look at each other for stories that they're missing - printed newspapers do that as well, particularly if the word "exclusive" is used. (It seems to mean not "only we have this story" but "we think that one or more of the other papers haven't".) They have such tricks as holding the juiciest pieces back from the first edition of the day so that competitors don't see those stories until later than would be the case, if they do at all.
But I'd like to believe that they do their own investigation - which is why, if you are -in- a news story, for instance a police officer in a particularly entertaining murder case, you will be telephoned by all the journalists, instead of just one good one and everybody else copies the story from them - which would be better for everybody involved.
Of course, stories independently and successfully compiled that refer to the same facts are liable to look the same - like a classroom of chemistry students writing uP what happened to their individual samples of copper sulphate.
And of course once in a while a journalist goes "Sod it, I can't be bothered" and just swipes from a competitor. Or worse: there are many cases of reviewing some public show or other, sometimes quite harshly, where the reviewer didn't actually go to the show.
For instance, did you know that CES hasn't actually taken place since 2007? :-)
in the past I used to read ALL posts here, inclusive almost ALL comments. The reason for this matter was the writers were giving us a high class journalism information product. Yeah, now they're gone somewhere else.
The new inquirer seems much more informed, but only in quantitative way, and it seems also much, much, much less inspired ( actually I have to say it more time: much much much much much much less inspired). Now I read it about 1 in 20 articles, once everytwo weeks. You are offering subpar... hm not informations (they are ok) but "articles"!
Oh, thank you! And congrats as well, the new team and perhaps the editor who manages it are just "great". Thanks again that you made me realize I have now a lot of free time to do something else.
Yeah, you can be innocent on the plagiarism matter, but who really cares anymore about this ? I would say... it is possible. Before, that wouldn't have happened: the style was so specific that any attempt of plagiarism would be instantly visible.
I think it must be the generation of "new, young, strategically important geniuses" ruling there now.
Where in the AMD press release it was mentioned that VIA and NVidia had also left? They were keeping fairly quiet about it and it needed research to find that (research being something that the Inq seems to suck at)
Since I don't have to PAY or Subscribe to read news here ,WHO CARES where it comes from !
When all the web news sites start wanting money to read news , then will you still be complaining ? Probably So.
Plagiarism is beginning to sound like defamation of character in legal terms!
All written words are made of letters of the alphabet so technically each time a word is written, the forming of the letters are plagiarism.
If, all of us writers would check, link to, and cite our sources we could continue to write about interesting subjects that others want to read about instead of plagiarism.
What nonsense. You most certainly do have a policy of never linking to direct rivals, even when that's the only way of (legitimately) standing up a story. This policy has crossed my path before, and I know it for a fact. Whether or not you have a set list of competitors is irrelevant - everyone knows who they are.