On plagiarism and TNW

Update: It's interesting that Gross should have such an issue with The Next Web. The funny thing is that I had great relations with their news and Apple editor, Matthew Panzarino, just today (May 16th). I can't say they don't plagiarize, but I can say that some -- Matthew, at least -- of them are willing to work with the original publishers of content well.

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]esterday, The Next Web's design editor Harrison Weber blatantly plagiarized an article written by freelance web designer and developer Joshua Gross. The article's main topic -- of little importance to the point, but still mentionable -- was on how the New York City taxi cab service took in a good $144,146,165 in extra tips just from introducing a new system that had three buttons to choose whether the passenger would like to give a 20%, 25%, or 30% tip to the cabby. Anyway, on to the important part.

Joshua Gross was the original author of this piece -- he gathered all the information and made the calculations himself. Weber of TNW then thought he could simply take this information, say that Joshua found it, and paste it into his own article without any sort of quotations. Yes, he did give reference, but he didn't do a blockquote or anything of the sort to show that it wasn't written by him; it was an exact copy of what was written on notes.unwieldy.

While Gross was right in saying that this was plagiarism, the whole thing got taken way out of proportion. After gaining lots of recognition on link-based blogs like that of Daring Fireball, many readers began to say they were removing The Next Web from their reading list forever due to such fear of plagiarism.

Okay, that's just going too far.

You don't need to leave a website because one thing happens. If you do, then you aren't thinking about the situation at all. It'd be one thing if they were known for such appalling plagiarism, but they're not. In fact, I don't remember them ever being criticized for such a thing, so there's no reason for readers to just leave the site because of one single incident.

What Weber did was wrong and Zee Kane -- CEO of TNW -- defended him because it's his responsibility to. However, if he were any sort of honorable man, he'd think for just a second and say "Yes, it was a mistake and I'm sorry -- we've fixed it". He did no such thing and rather made matters worse.