Boulevard Sentinel Plagarism?
Ξ July 30th, 2009 | → | ∇ Highland Park |
Did the Boulevard Sentinel lift a story on last week’s shooting of a bicyclist in their August issue?
On July 13th, the 90042 blog wrote a piece on a cyclist who was shot in the back during a group bicycle ride through Highland Park. Three days later, the Boulevard Sentinel blog reported the same incident with some disturbingly similar language. As an example, compare their opening paragraphs:
90042: The bicycle phenomenon known as Midnight Ridazz had a near tragedy as they rode down Avenue 52 this past Friday night. Around midnight (hence the name), as hundreds of cyclists were making their way from Griffith Park, through Highland Park, and on their way over to Lincoln Heights during the Neverland-themed ride the group was attacked as they descended down Avenue 52 just before the Pasadena Freeway at Bomer Drive.
Boulevard Sentinel: Hundreds of cyclists known as Midnight Ridazz had a near tragedy as they rode down Avenue 52 on Friday night, July10, around midnight. As they were making their way through Highland Park, on their way to Lincoln Heights, the group was attacked as they cruised down Avenue 52 near the Pasadena Freeway.
The Boulevard Sentinel Blog article continues in this manner without ever attributing their story to the 90042 blog.
If this were only present on their blog, then I doubt I’d waste time with this post. The blogosphere is a notorious echo chamber where people play fast and loose with citations. Hell, Waltarrrrr! at 90042 had to remind us to attribute a photo on a Gold Line crash a couple of years back.
The biggest problem lies in the fact that the blog post from the 17th was then printed verbatim into the August issue of the Boulevard Sentinel. Even 90042’s version of events and editorializing are copied in the article:
90042: When the rolling mass of cyclists with blinking lights, bells, horns, and amplified music trailers went rolling by a house party on 52, the occupants there started yelling, “Fuck you white boys!” (despite the diverse crowd of men and women of every skin color).
Boulevard Sentinel: When the cyclists with blinking lights, bells, horns, and amplified music trailers went rolling by a house party on 52, the occupants there started yelling, “F–k you white boys” (despite the diverse crowd of men and women of every skin color).
To be fair, the article appears without any attribution, so it’s possible there is an alternate explanation.
Nevertheless, I don’t expect the same level of reporting from a blog (especially a small unpaid blog such as 90042) as I do from the for-profit print media. I’m sure Waltarrrrr! at 90042 has a day job just like we do, but the staff at the Boulevard Sentinel are paid via home-delivery subscriptions and advertising revenue. I expect them to make a phone call to Midnight Ridazz or the LAPD when writing a story about a neighborhood shooting. Barring that, they need to at least credit outside sources they use to write their articles. We’ve sent emails to both 90042 and the Boulevard Sentinel that haven’t been answered yet.
7 Responses to ' Boulevard Sentinel Plagarism? '
on August 1st, 2009 at 2:06 am
The BS as we call it here is NOT a legitimate newspaper but a pitiful joke masquerading as journalism. The guy can’t spellcheck or write a coherent sentence, much less make attributions from sources.
on August 1st, 2009 at 3:21 am
Yeah, they stole it. No permission asked / no attribution given. That’s plagiarism defined.
Just last month they printed a photo without proper credit taken from here:
http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/figueroawashington.htm
I was surprised that they included the unedited “F-you” part. That’s something you’d see on my blog, or printed in the Weekly, but not a local community newspaper.
I feel the same way you do about the real journalist. We bloggers may be quick on the draw. But when it comes to real journalism, I expect the professionals to do their job do the reporting worthy of a newspaper.
(And yeah, I’ve been busy, I had a 11:45pm deadline tonight, so it took me a while to get to the blog thing. I hope to post more on this at 90042 later today.)
¡Muchisimas gracias, on the tip!
on August 1st, 2009 at 7:52 am
oh, this is rich. isn’t that topping editor a certified whackjob? i fully expect to pick up next issue of the BS and see both yorkblvd and 90042 libeled because of this. then you’ll know you guys are doing your job right. and props for sticking up for waltarrrr. he’s a good egg.
on August 2nd, 2009 at 11:45 am
Please give Tom a break before you start taking personal jabs at him “certified whackjob”. He may not be perfect, but he puts out the paper because he believes in it. He shows up regularly at local meeting and is sometimes the only one writing about what is going on politically in our community. NELA is a lot like a small town and his paper is a lot like a small town paper. At least give him a chance to fix it before you start lighting the torches. Remember, we are all neighbors here.
on August 2nd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
well said, br1. we are all neighbors here. in that spirit, i hope he makes things right with a mea culpa and proper attribution. i’ll be looking forward to the next issue.
on August 3rd, 2009 at 11:47 am
The BS is exactly that, and has always been. It began in the mid-to-late 1990s as a personal rant against folks in Eagle Rock who wanted to see their town’s failing commercial districts turn into something vibrant and appealing.
Well, the BS publisher apparently didn’t want our town to overcome its continuing economic and aesthetic downward spiral, and the Eagle Rock Chamber of Commerce was doing nothing to improve the area either. They instead were busy holding fundraisers and giving themselves awards for “service” while constantly blaming residents for the business district’s condition “because they don’t shop here.”
Those of us who were forward-thinking and willing to work ignored the BS’s and Chamber’s seething and chest-thumping and were able to help turn things around by utilizing existing law, researching and arguing for or against various land-use issues, demanding better development, and aggressively marketing our town. It took years of perseverance, but it worked.
For a very long time, Occidental College was embarrassed to say it was located in Eagle Rock. Not anymore.
The comments about plagiarism in the BS are certainly nothing new. Items I wrote for the weekly e.letter of The Eagle Rock Association (TERA) over a period of six to nine years ago were routinely lifted by the BS, word for word, and always without attribution.
The publisher of the BS has no journalistic integrity, because he’s not a journalist. He’s a narrow-minded guy with an angry point of view who can’t write, and he targets those who don’t agree with him. I know, because I’m one of them. Just a couple of years ago, in a published editorial, he equated me with a child molester and accused me of causing a man to lose his home.
His articles are often laced with his own feelings masquerading as fact. He’s been known to create a news story by fanning the flames and place it on the front page with huge and damning headlines and photos to try to sway public opinion. If he needs fill, he just takes it, as he apparently did recently.
I have written proof that he and his cohorts claimed falsehoods on sworn affidavits involving a very heated local Building and Safety issue about a decade ago, so he can’t be trusted to tell the truth. The facts, and the law, eventually won out without ever having to publicly reveal the perjury.
To address br1’s comment: The BS publisher has been known to show contrition on occasion but without actually saying it or expressing regret, at least as far as I know. Instead, he tries to improve his journalistic efforts to make up for it but so often falls back into the abyss of his old habits, again becoming infuriated and raging about something or copying the written material of others he never credits because he can’t manage to come up with it himself.
About 12 years ago, he was taking some life-improvement courses. I know this only because he showed up on my doorstep and told me. Part of the course requirement, he said, was to apologize to those he’d wronged. (Another local activist he’d relentlessly gone after told me he appeared at her door as well.) He asked to come in, broke down in tears in my office, confessed, and asked what he could do to make amends.
I suggested he join TERA and see what we were really about so he would stop lying about us and our activities. It was a most bizarre encounter, but he did send in his membership application and check, and I was optimistic that things would change. A scant two or three months later, however, he was back to attacking me and TERA and continued his smear campaign for many more years.
The BS has been his personal trash bin since day one. Don’t read it. Or, if you do, complain to his advertisers. No one should profit from such drivel. There are e.publications in Northeast LA that cover local issues, are far better written, and actually qualify as news.
on August 10th, 2009 at 10:28 am
The self-improvement course that Joanne says Tom Topping was taking sounds more like Alcoholics Anonymous — the need to apologize to those he had offended. And Tom Topping offends many normal people. He has been proven to be a pathological liar and I, as well as Joanne, am living proof that Tom Topping will libel and slander anyone he gets in a hissy fit over. I don’t know where his anger comes from, but his constant badgering and cornering and harassing people got him beaten up last December at Colombo’s. And he has apparently not learned his lesson. He slandered me and a few others by writing in his vile rag that the minutes-takers for the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council were falsifying their minutes to assist Vice President Jim Perry in his lawsuit against Topping — for — guess what? — libel and slander. The idea is ridiculous to the point of being completely unbelievable. Why would we risk our jobs to falsify the minutes — at $15 an hour? What a joke. Plus, Tom forgets that it is up to the full Board to approve the minutes a week or so after they have been written, before they are posted. My minutes were always approved as written, so where is the falsification, Tommy Girl? I saw the piece that he plagiarized in his crappy newspaper. What a joke. He could at least have read the original article and then writen his version, but, NO-O-O-O-O-O . . . he utilizes cut and paste — theft! — to write his stolen article as if nobody would notice. But that’s Tommy Girl: contemptuous of everyone, hoggish, a gutter liar, full of shit. And don’t forget his lies about the taco trucks. In his rant about the taco trucks, he claimed that they will put every restaurant in L.A. out of busines, and once again he deliberately lied by writing tht he had to squeeze through a “gauntlet” of taco trucks to get inside the Highland Park restaurant Cinnamon, despite the fact that taco trucks have never parked there before or since he wrote those lying words. You know what? He just lies because he likes the sound of it. He doesn’t care if it’s true or not. He’ll say anything or do anything. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.
Ken Camp, Los Angeles