영국사람

KOREA TIMES REPORTER: Easiest job in the world?

I saw a posting up on Dave’s ESL Cafe this week that prompted me to copy/paste a KT story up on my facebook page so that others may mock it: Jessica Simpson Farts During Business Meeting. In the first sentence, they left the line “A source tells US Weekly…” that lets us know that this is not first hand news. A quick Google shows the full extent of the plagiarism.

EXCLUSIVE: Oops! Jessica Simpson Farts During Business Meeting

It is a straight lift of this story. All they have done is copied the responses, removing the reference to her ‘stink ass’ and Dutch Ovens, and hey presto, article formed and ready to be credited to mook@koreatimes.co.kr

Is that all?

Actually no… I decided to see if this was common place in the “People” section of the newspaper, so I took a glance over other recent news.

There is another story up there about a (very) young mother in China. The KT have cited their source and then copied (almost word for word) the original article, all credit to mook@koreatimes.co.kr

They have a picture up there that is obviously unrelated to the story. Well… obvious to all but us Brits. It shows former Coronation Street star Tina O’Brien. Many years ago, her character on the soap had a teen pregnancy, though one look at that picture will show you that she is in no way a child star any more…

So why use the picture of an adult Tina O’Brien? The enterprising mook@koreatimes.co.kr was being diligent and hard-working! You see, changing a headline from  “Tina O’Brien starts smoking again – less than a year after fronting quit campaign for NHS” [Mail Online] to “Non-Smoking Campaign Model Caught Smoking” is all you need to do to create an entirely new piece that in no way needs crediting.

From the mail article, Mook was able to acquire photographs for both the “China” and “Smoking” stories, and as we all know, cropping the copyright information from a photograph is a ‘cunning’ way to avoid paying for their use.

Mook is not the only person doing this. The Learning Times (International News) section of the website may as well be renamed “Yoinked”. I sampled 5 random articles, and they had all been taken verbatim from other publications with no attempt made to credit the original source.