Monday, July 01, 2013

"SwimSwam" obviously plagiarized and the person that plagiarized from "Swimming World" should issue an apology ASAP




Above are two screenshots, one from Swimming World and the one below it is from SwimSwam. (Click to enlarge.)

On June 27th 2013: Swimming World published the following article: [Link]

On June 30th 2013: SwimSwam copy/pasted the above article from Swimming World and by making just a few modifications called it their own. [Link]

SwimSwam obviously plagiarized and the person that plagiarized from Swimming World should issue an apology as soon as possible and the article should be taken down with said apology in it's place.

I know all about plagiarism, not only have I had work stolen from this blog twice that I know of and I watched my father go from a used car salesman in the San Fernando Valley to the International Editor of the Hollywood Reporter.

I wrote this blog post and I am updating here about my father and his plagiarism some years ago. It applies to this recent incident and the behavior of a lazy writer at SwimSwam:

Texas Swimmer spanks Timed Finals [For Plagiarism]

My dad started out as a used car salesman and eventually became the international editor for the Hollywood Reporter. He had a syndicated radio program in Australia and Lee Marvin once tried to punch him out. A pilot TV show was made from one of his books, and he broke the story that Walt Disney was dying of cancer before the mainstream media knew how ill he was.

Every morning before school he would get me up at 5:30 A.M., throw some clothes at me, and we would drive from newsstand to newsstand to see which one had gotten the Hollywood Reporter or the Daily Variety first. He would hand me 50 cents so I could buy them for him and then we would return home for breakfast.

At the kitchen table or sometimes a diner he would underline sentences from the Army Archerd column in The Daily Variety, and then do the same thing to the guy who wrote the gossip column for The Hollywood Reporter. I forgot his name.

One morning, I got fed up with getting up so early so at breakfast I asked "what are you doing, you underline these sentences every morning?" He replied back, "I am writing my column." And I said, "No you not, you're copying, you're cheating!" (I was in the 2nd grade.) It didn't go over well and I never asked again. Ultimately my dad plagiarized his way into entertainment journalism. 

Well, that is what Scott Goldblatt, the editor of Timed Finals, is being accused of doing by the swim blog, Texas Swimming. I have accused him of it too and I understand that a particular writer for the Australian press is getting wind of this sort of nonsense as well.

All Scott has to do to alleviate this criticism is to ensure he credits his sources. If he doesn't, he and the parent company of Timed Finals, the Wasserman Media Group, are going to become irrelevant to swimming.

My dad shamefully got away with it circa the 1960's, but in the age of the internet whereas everything is databased, that isn't going to happen.

Here is a link to the Texas Blog spanking. The photo to the right is the Texas swimmer himself: [Link]



5 comments:

Michelle said...

The more things change the more they stay the same. Goldblatt's been plagiarizing as long as I've been a serious swimming fan (nearly 10 years now). You'd think he (or at least his sponsors) would learn, but then why write something yourself when your sponsors will pay you to steal it from someone else?

Tony Austin said...

The site started out so promising too.

You just made me realize something. My poor grammar and spelling is proof I don't plagiarize.

Button said...

hahaha!!! good thing you took a screen shot:

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Liliana said...

Well at least they had some decency to take down that article.

Dingleberry said...

I feel you should correct yourself. I understand that you felt you could draw comparisons to articles you cobbled together in the past, but now AND in the future you should probably clearly articulate who the actual author of the stolen content was without implying correlations between entities when those correlations are not correct. I know that you'll think that you made it clear, and that this comment is an ignorant one, but based upon Michelle's comment above, there are some that would believe that people mentioned in this article were involved in the new one on SwimSwam. I like your blog and read it often, but without making these things clear, you're setting yourself up for legal actions.