There has been a lot of outrage recently throughout the Fox Sports blogging community regarding the fact that the powers that be at Fox tends to reward their own writers with Blog of the Day and Most Interesting Blog while ignoring other, usually better, "amateurs" within the community.  The frustration of born2playin69, socalsportsfan and others is justified: we're all here for different reasons, but it's always nice to see our name and that of our blog listed on the front page for all to see and peruse, if only because it is an acknowledgement that someone is paying attention to our work.

Still, the favoritism shown by the Fox interns (as a former two-time intern, there is little doubt in my mind that this is who gets the joy of picking our blogs and reading our wrathful comments) who update that particular section daily (or weekly, depending on their collective mood) doesn't bother me so much as another "ism" that I had always heard about but never actually witnessed until the last few weeks: Plagiarism.

Plagiarism was addressed here a few months ago (during NGS I - I wasn't here at the time, but have heard about it here and there) and mentioned at least once recently, by Ultra.  When Ultra wrote his post accusing FlyingPig of stealing information he presented in comments several weeks ago, he was loudly shouted down and derided for worrying about an insignificant topic, a reaction that I think (I hope?) had more to do with his overall reputation and perception within the community than with the seriousness of the issue at hand.

Personally, I find plagiarism on this web site to be as bad as or worse than the routine favoritism, if not as pervasive.  In both cases, someone who attains BOTD or MIP through that method is taking a spot away from another blogger who has put in the time and effort to put together an original piece, be it one of Northsider's lengthy research articles or cuziffer's "off-the-cuff" rants.  Those types of posts are the ones that deserve the utmost respect within this community, not the ones that consist of three sentences and no lucid thought or are cobbled together from the writings of ESPN's Gregg Easterbrook and Bill Simmons.

It was actually a rip-off of Easterbrook's October 2 Tuesday Morning Quarterback column that led me to write this post.  A couple of weeks ago, a Fox Sports blogger who since appears to have packed up and moved on wrote a post about the increasing popularity of high school football, including a discussion of the fictional "Briscoe High School" football team that sounded awfully familiar.  The obvious similarities led me to TMQ's archive page at ESPN.com and a little searching found that much of the blog post consisted of information from Easterbrook's article that had been slightly altered (a word or two here, an additional sentence there) and passed off as original composition.  Bothered, I looked back at other items this particular blogger had written and found that a lot of his material read the same way: taking numerous jokes from a Simmons column, lifting sections from an SI.com article and copying entire stories from thebrushback.com.  In all cases, the material was passed off as his own, with the occasional (and useless, since it didn't come close to giving due credit) "Source - ESPN.com" at the bottom.

Most bothersome to me was the fact that no one else seemed to notice: he began to routinely draw twenty-plus comments per post and eventually received recognition as a Most Interesting Blog on more than one occasion.  Most frustrating was the fact that he seemed oblivious to the wrongness of his actions: I emailed him at one point with the suggestion that he was better than that and why not just write his own stuff.  He never wrote back.

When that blogger deleted all his writing and packed up his blog recently, I figured I had nothing more to worry about - not that I'm the plagiarism police or anything, but it was kind of annoying to know that somebody was doing something wrong and not really be able to do anything about it without calling them out, which was a step I wasn't ready to take.  Yesterday, however, a post on Goodfella8's blog caught my eye: "Overexposure?" the headline asked.  Reading further, it became apparent that Easterbrook had been ripped off again.  The story is taken nearly verbatim from the aforementioned October 2 edition of TMQ, which talked extensively about the Briscoe High School commercial and the potential upcoming ruination of high school sports.  By my count, only two of nine paragraphs were even possibly original, with four coming from TMQ and three, inexplicably, from ContraCostaTimes.com, a newspaper in California.  The only attribution was a "Source of information - ESPN.com, SI.com".

I'm writing this post because I have a sneaking suspicion that Goodfella8 is actually the same blogger who first caught my eye several weeks ago, which means that I've already called attention to this once, given him a chance to stop doing what he was doing and therefore don't feel bad about mentioning this in a public forum.  The particularly depressing aspect is that the post above followed one that appeared to be original and well written, a good solid effort that showcased his ability to write an interesting, readable story.

There are frequent contributors to this web site who will attack this post.  I know demonicume in the past has had trouble with regular Fox Sports writers who have taken material from the blogs and might view this as an "eye for an eye" situation: they steal our stuff, we can steal theirs.  That's fine with me if he or anyone else feels that way - it's your opinion and you're welcome to it.  But I, however, think the collection of writers and thinkers that we have here can do much better than that.