Slate magazine journalist gets a tip that one of his pieces has been plagiarised. It turns out that it’s not just one piece, and it’s not just him.

with the exception of the local events listings, every single item in the June 3-July 10 Bulletin is suspicious. Indeed, I wonder: In purely statistical terms, do the articles in the Montgomery County Bulletin amount to the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism?

The publisher and writer respond via the Houston Press.

It must have taken years of seasoned investigative know-how to push me off my lofty perch. It takes a dogged, intrepid journalist to expose the alleged wrongdoings of a 44-year-old college dropout who drifted from one lousy media job to another for 20 years; it takes courage to debase someone with a mouthful of cut-rate dentures who, up until 2007, lived in his parents’ home for seven years due to near-fatal bouts of clinical depression; it takes a journalist of a certain caliber to torpedo a pathetic hack who has barely squeezed out a living for nearly a decade at seven cents a word.

[Via MetaFilter]

It seems that AOL’s intrepid army of bloggers has been told to stop posting in order to save money – so some of them are continuing to blog unpaid.

Ian Betteridge argues that blogs aren’t as self-correcting as yer Scobles like to claim:

Watching the development and correction of stories, there’s something interesting that I’ve always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that’s 100,000 people who believe the original story – and unless Scoble’s readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that’s a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

I’ve got a column about this very same thing in issue 181 of .net (which isn’t out for a while yet). It’s the old problem of truth versus Internet Facts.

Tangent: Ian’s blog fell out of my subscriptions list for no good reason a while back. I’d forgotten what a great blog he has.

Some writers get rather upset if sub-editors change their copy, as this sweary rant from Giles Coren demonstrates:

When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion.

Then again, Roland White has a different view:

Subeditors are the people who correct our mistakes. All journalism is done in a hurry, so it’s inevitable that mistakes are mad. Subeditors are our safety net. They make sure that copy fits, see that our words make some vague sort of sense and finally they write the headlice.

They are hot stuff on split infinitives, can advise on the correct way to spell Gadaffi and are virtually the only people outside Burkina Faso who care that it used to be known as Upper Volta. Imagine an English teacher with a flick knife and you’ve got the general idea.

I’ve had the odd thing butchered in editing (not by anyone I currently work with, I hasten to add). The worst was a piece for the Sunday Mail where the only original word that survived the sub-editing process was “the”; I’ve had subtle gags ruined by unnecessary exclamation marks; and I’ve been the recipient of sub-editing that takes the same approach to fixing copy as Father Ted did to fixing a little dent in a car.

Generally, though, I’m with A.A. Gill:

The joy of being a hack is that there is a back room of people far cleverer, more experienced and adept than I working to make me look clever, experienced and adept. If on occasion I fail to do so, naturally it’s their fault.