In response to a recent post calling out The Register-Star for swiping a breaking news story and plagiarizing a sentence from this site, an apology has been received from Executive Editor Theresa Hyland for the “copying of your blog entry contents into our story.”
Writing that she was “upset” by the reporter’s actions, which Hyland said “do not meet our journalistic standards and we cannot tolerate such behavior,” she also noted that “we have let the offending reporter go.”
The intent of the post was to put a stop to the predatory use of local blogs as news-gathering sources without crediting them as sources, not to get anyone fired. Though plagiarism is indeed a cardinal sin of journalism—and this example was flagrant—it’s debatable whether it rose to a firing offense.
The apology was appreciated and appears to be sincere. Not knowing what other factors and history played into the paper’s decision, this site is not in a position to judge the full cause and appropriateness of their employment decision.
(Interestingly enough, the reporter “let go” was himself a replacement for some of the staff lost in the paper’s controversial firing last winter of another Hudson beat reporter, which led to multiple resignations of other news staff.)
