Last but not least: Cite, aggregate, research - fired
A Huffington Post employee was fired for plagiarizing a piece from the U.S. advertising publication Ad Age. This case has sparked a discussion in U.S. online media about the practice of summarizing content.
The original author of the text, Simon Dumenco, complained because his article was linked on the Huffington Post but did not achieve enough page views. The same article was linked at the technical aggregator Techmeme, which only transported the headline and link, without a hand-written summary. In this way, the link achieved 746 pageviews, compared to 57 pageviews for the Huffington Post. This was reported by Meedia.de on Tuesday. Dumenco sees this as a rebuttal to the argument often used by HuffPo co-founder Arianna Huffington that the online newspaper drives more traffic to other websites through aggregations, according to Meedia.de. The Huffington Post employee was fired after Dumenco complained and made the case public, as Meedia.de further writes. The Huffington Post has "zero tolerance for this kind of behavior", explained Peter Goodman, the business editor responsible at the Huffington Post. This can also be read on Meedia.de. What happened was "totally unacceptable" and contradicted the conventions in the HuffPo newsroom, Goodman continued.
We regret the dismissal of the employee, but above all the lack of understanding on the part of the person in charge at the Huffington Post, who clearly no longer even seems to understand the jobs of his subordinates. Firing an online editor because she aggregated too much is comparable to taking away a dog's stick because it fetched it too often - unfair.
