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Plagiarists are really stupid

By razib on February 15, 2010.

Another instance of a really dumb plagiarist, from The New York Times Corrections:

In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, a Times reporter appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations.

The reporter, Zachery Kouwe, reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment.

You work for The New York Times, and you plagiarize from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc.? Seriously. Dude even paid for J-school. Am I just not "getting" the plagiarist logic here? If you're going to steal copy, why not steal it from somewhere obscure, instead of your primary American rivals? (in the domain of business news) There are gonna be lots of people reading all of them, someone will notice. Sean Paul Kelley is looking like a genius....

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It makes sense - plagarism, especially in the context of journalism, is the product of extreme laziness. Rewritting the sections one might be tempted to lift to a degree that it would no longer be considered plagarism requires very little effort, so there's generally little effort put into concealing plagarism either.