But then presenting the results of that research shouldn't be too difficult. All you really have to do is point readers to where they can find more information. Ideally this means citing sources which, as it turns out, may not have always happened.
Over the weekend, a Gambit reader noticed that some recent Blake Pontchartrain columns contained passages that hewed closely to materials that were published elsewhere. In some cases, passages in the Blake columns were identical, or nearly identical, to the work of others.So far the only specific examples of the plagiarism that have been made public are the ones noted in this Romenesko post. It's worth pointing out that one is a case of some facts about Fort Pike copy/pasted from a state tourism website while the other is the definition of a word. So it's perhaps not the most scandalous lifting of original work the world has ever seen. But then this just raises the question, couldn't they insert a single "according to so and so" line in there somewhere and easily solve everyone's problem?
The other interesting fact about this is the "discoverer" of this scandal happens to be a Times-Picayune reporter. So it's worth remembering that as the cutbacks at the T-P have become the major media story of 2012-13, Gambit has provided the most thorough coverage of those events.
Not that any of that excuses plagiarism. As an interested reader, I'd like to go back through the "Blake" archives and determine for myself if there's anything more egregious than the two examples of laziness highlighted in the Romenesko piece but Gambit has flushed them down a memory hole, at least for the time being.
In any case, I hope this doesn't lead to the permanent discontinuation of the column. I know I'm not alone in saying it's one of my most anticipated weekly reads.
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