David Burroughs, the writer of a weekly surf column for the Ventura County Star has been picking up stories all over the place and running them as his own according to a story in Editor & Publisher.
In an unbylined story, the Star said evidence of the plagiarism emerged when the paper was contacted by the news director of Southern California Public Radio, who pointed out that a Jan. 22 column about a proposed highway that would go through a surfing spot included seven paragraphs apparently taken directly from an online version of its story on the highway expansion.
When editors at The Star looked into it they found even more.
Further investigation by The Star uncovered a Feb. 5 column by Burroughs regarding the theft of a web camera trained on a popular East Coast surfing spot. . . . Much of six paragraphs in that column came from a Jan. 27 story in the New York Times by Corey Kilgannon.
Burroughs apparently admitted that he had used the information but said that since he was using “mostly quotations from other sources that it was not plagiarism.” The paper said Burroughs had no journalism experience when he was hired. Guess that’s how newspapers do it these days.
[Link: Ventura County Star via Editor & Publisher]
