You have to wonder what these writers are thinking. We have the technology necessary for an automatic plagiarism detector. Google could release one at will. It will only be a matter of time before all previous instances of plagiarism are brought to light.
I don't, actually. If Ars and all the rest of them are paying what, say, Gizmodo is paying, Amy Tietel is making $5 per 1,000 pageviews.. So how many pageviews does this article get? Hard to say... but Vice brags 16m pageviews per day. Its total payout is $16,000 per day. That includes three Youtube channels that need content created. motherboard.vice.com advertised 16 articles yesterday and it's just one subdomain. So how much did Amy Shira Tietel get paid to plagiarize? Dunno, but I'll bet it was substantially less than Dwayne Day gets paid by Smithsonian Magazine. This be another reason I bought into NSFWCorp... which I might not have done if I hadn't already read Trust Me I'm Lying. We really have dismantled our journalism in favor of sweatshop labor - this article didn't have the disclaimer ...until I busted them. And that was on a popular book that had been spammed about in email for fifteen years at that point. It's easier to just dump a whole bunch of shit into the drink and then if you get caught, pull the article and say nothing. I'll bet Amy got less than $10 for that article. We could ask @theadvancedapes.@ Huffingtonpost pays "nothing" or "almost nothing." I might be tempted to rip off wikipedia too.Major Brian Shul is the author of Sled Driver, a fascinating account of his experiences as a pilot of the SR-71 Blackbird. The book has been out of print for two years now, but now you can buy one of the 3,500 limited edition copies—signed by Shul and other SR-71 legends—here. There are only a few left, so hurry up.
Excerpts via vfp62.com, a site dedicated to the officers and enlisted men who served with VFP-62, Light Photographic Squadron 62, Home Base Cecil Field (NZC), FLA. It's full of great anecdotes and images.
I would guess based on the post you made the other day about all the quality made good that you like to buy that you would agree with me that we have dismantled a lot of industries in favor of sweatshop labor. Unfortunately, journalism is the one industry that's supposed to protect us from all the other ones when it's working properly (via keeping us informed with free information). The way journalism has been undermined in the last decade or so is a crying shame. Free press means more than just being able to say whatever you like without going to jail. The real question is how to fix it? As long as the click for pay model is in effect, I don't think that anything is going to improve. Imagine in the 80's thinking that you could go to the newsstand and grab a copy of the Times and be pissed off that the attendant at the kiosk wanted you to pay him for it. Or better yet, be pissed off that you have to pay for home delivery each and every day. We don't even have to go to the goddam curb any more to grab our paper off the lawn, and we want the shit free? Doesn't make sense.We really have dismantled our journalism in favor of sweatshop labor...
This is one of the reasons I recommend Ryan Holiday's book - he makes the observation that we are not experiencing "the end of journalism" we are paralleling the time of yellow journalism. The New York Times created modern journalism back then by going to a subscription - based model, which allowed them to bypass the sensationalism that sells broadsheets on street corners in favor of a predictable, reliable income stream that permitted them to focus on reality and its reporting. The Republican noise machine, built up by Lee Atwater in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's defeat, was ground to a nub against the Iraq War. At the time I figured they'd really regret that but they made a shit ton of money and the whole apparatus had an expiration date anyway. I think the Iraq War and its runup was a touchstone in the history of distrust and the press; I think the ascendancy of The Huffington Post is pretty much the nadir of journalism. I expect we'll start seeing an uptick soon. The NYT went back behind a paywall and survived. So did the WSJ. I pay for The Week, I pay for NSFWCorp. All this blog shit? It's gonna be a footnote, like Hearst and Pulitzer and the Spanish American War.
I can see that. Still, if I were writing articles for Ars for so little, I would probably be entertaining the notion that part of the value was building enough experience so that I might get a higher paying gig at a major outfit. If they aren't doing it already, it won't be long before the interview process will involve a plagiarism search. Heck you could probably sell that to news organizations. Tietel is creating a trail of wrong-doing that can forever haunt her.
Presumes a few things: A) that higher-paying gigs exist. The model of late is 1) blog 2) move blog to higher-paying site 3) sell higher-paying site to old media 4) profit. The old media buyout thing is dying off, though - it's just not happening as much. So the payoffs are less and less likely. B) That publishers give a shit. Gawker demonstrably doesn't. HuffPo demonstrably doesn't. Vice demonstrably doesn't. When the NYT have Jayson Blair and Dan Pink on their rap sheets the online bureaus can argue that the standards aren't as important as they were. C) That anybody really remembers. Ben Domenech still has a job. Henry Blodgett is CEO of Business Insider.
Yes, my presumptions may be wrong. But as you mention to b_b, paywalls are coming back. I agree, and the jobs behind them are likely going to be competitive. I suspect Teitel's actions could keep he on this side of the wall. I can't see being a writer and not thinking about that. But, people do stupid things. This is one of them.