The question is so ridiculous I didn’t think anyone would consider it seriously.
See, the problem with your post is that I clearly haven’t had enough coffee yet. Sorry about that, and carry on.
Cindy Adams is 84 years old. I seriously doubt she’s spending much seat time in front of the computer.
What I would bet is going on is that some 20-something-year-old intern is Googling for her or her editor or whoever is really writing the column and they’re lifting stuff from what they find. I can’t speak as to Ms. Adams physical condition or state of mind but she’s not beating the streets herself to get these items. This is probably about half a step away from stuff like Parade’s “Walter Scott Personality Parade.” Walter Scott went to that great editing room in the sky a while back.
The SDMB is often high up in searches and so it would be likely they’d not go far to get what they were looking for.
“Cindy Adams” (or whoever) writes a gossip column in the NYPost, so this is sort of like expecting cites from the National Inquirer.
Are you saying the supposed editor is actually writing the columns that go out under the Adams name?
I’m shocked to hear that kind of thing goes on.
Happens to me all the time.
But seriously, has anyone asked Ms Adams about this?
Just goes to show you should take almost any source with a pinch of salt. A few years ago, I read an interesting BBC article (I can’t remember the subject, but I might be able to dig it up again). I thought I’d find out more about the subject, so I headed to Wikipedia. I was surprised to discover that the BBC article was just a 5 minute rearranging of the Wikipedia entry. But here, and on Wikipedia, BBC articles are considered good citations. I wonder how many other “good” ones are based on supposedly much less reliable sources, without even any cross-referencing or fact-checking.
I notice that Cindy Adams, whoever she is, has taken some perfectly well-written comments and rearranged them into quite an annoying style. I’d much rather just read the SDMB thread than come out of a newspaper article feeling informed, but extremely violent towards anyone who. Uses too many. Full. Stops.
So…we shouldn’t wait up for a royalty check?
Anyhoo, seems pretty scummy. She not only lifted the contents from that thread, she also stole some of the commentary.
And yet weirdly, she also altered stuff in quotation marks. I wonder if she was trying to prevent people from searching for the quotes and stumbling back on the SDMB thread. The changes seem pretty trivial, and don’t really scan better than the originals.
It’s really pathetic. I have sent this over to Ed’s attention. Thanks for the detective work, Little Nemo.
In almost entirely unrelated vein, back in 2000 I once found a scrap of paper at work, on which was written the old puzzle about the three guests in the hotel sharing the $30 room (details upon request). I recognized it immediately, of course, from having read it in a Straight Dope book.
I laughed out loud when I saw at the bottom of the page that it was attributed to Cecilia Adama.
Round up the usual editors!
A couple of these would be fine. But in at least one case, the words are exact. That makes it plagiarism.
Copyright infringement is illegal. To establish copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976, you have to show:
- Unauthorized
- Copying
- Of the protectable aspects of a
— a. creative
— b. and original
— c. work of expression
— d. that has been fixed in a perceivable format.
— Copyright law protects expression only, not ideas or facts.
Plagiarism is not illegal. Generally speaking, plagiarism is the uncredited appropriation of another person’s work. This definition might have some degree of overlap with copyright infringement, but plagiarism often covers ideas as well as expression, which is a significant difference with respect to copyright law.
Plagiarism is specifically defined individually by entities such as educational institutions or private companies which decide on their own whether to take action against a member of that entity who has engaged in plagiarism.
What irritates me more isn’t the taking of content from the board, it’s the fact that all the content is unsubstantiated hearsay from unknown (to her) sources.
She’s passing it off as fact, when it’s really more like “I overheard someone in the subway say this about the guy.”
I know a story about a celebrity (dead now) who would pay for everything with a check in the hopes that the recipient would rather have the check with her signature than the money. I don’t mind sharing that story, but I’d be freekin pissed if someone put that story in a newspaper as fact without mentioning that the story is from a guy who is married to the woman who met this celeb a couple of times and heard the story from someone else.
Whatever you do, *don’t * have pizzas delivered en masse to her home. Turns out she loves her a pie, and can put them away as fast as they’re delivered. Or so they say. (Anonymous source.)
Isn’t that the whole point of a gossip column?
It has been said before but The New York Post is not a quality source of news anyway. They don’t strive to meet the standards of good journalism.
That article didn’t even strive to meet the standards of good grammar.
I do appreciate that it’s a gossip column, and in the Post, but it’s sort of like knowing that a friend is a “slob” then seeing his apartment and it’s filled with rotting garbage. You don’t quite realize how bad it really is.
It’s a column utterly devoid of anything resembling journalistic integrity. It’s so bad that it actually drains the journalistic integrity from nearby articles, if there is any.