ski web sites and how they work ….
23rd January 2008
aka, plagiarism and how it works….The sad news of the death of a skier while involved in a film project was carried earlier by The Salt Lake Tribune and the abc4.com website. Hers’s what abc4.com said
But today they said he took a bad line coming down a mountain called Wolverine Bowl and landed on an exposed rock face instead of the soft snow……..Search and rescue crews loaded Poole onto a back board and then into a helicopter but officials at the University of Utah Hospital said that Poole died at 1:30 pm, about two hours after the accident occurred.
A few hours later the story is “reported” by Snowheads.com using their tried and tested technique of Googling for news stories with the word ski in them and copying them :
A professional extreme skier died yesterday in Utah doing stunts for a Warren Miller film. Billy Poole died when he took a bad line coming down a mountain between Solitude and Brighton ski resorts and landed on an exposed rock face instead of the soft snow. Search and rescue crews helicoptered him to hospital. But, officials at the University of Utah Hospital said that he died at 1:30 pm, about 2 hours after the accident occurred.
The original sources of the story are mentioned and links provided but hardly any effort’s been made to even rephrase the original story and no editorial comment or analysis or contact made with original sources, just a straight piece of freeloading on someone else’s reporting. And then later, the Ski Club of Great Britain obtains the same scoop:
He was doing stunts in the area between Solitude and Brighton ski resorts, and died after taking a bad line coming down the mountain and landing on an exposed rock face instead of the soft snow.Search and rescue crews helicoptered him to hospital but officials at the University of Utah Hospital said that he died at 1:30 pm, about 2 hours after the accident occurred.
In an further piece of irony, Snowheads now complain that the Ski Club hasn’t linked to them as the (obvious) source of their story although they carried a text line acknowledging this, the hierarchy of etiquette involved in copying stories from the Internet and their subsequent recopying by equally lazy websites is apparently more complex than the casual observer might imagine.
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