Plagerism is the new black

Full disclosure: I'm a frustrated feature writer. I wish people would pay me to write whimsical light fun features. They don't even have to be funny or light. My dream, when I was a wannabe journalist, was to tell stories about everyday people and show how they aren't necessarily ordinary people. Show readers that we shouldn't dismiss people. Everybody has value. Then I realized that not everybody has an interesting story, but we can still learn stuff from the most boring or annoying people. I'd probably write something like, "How to be the belle of the ball" or "Wake up your alter ego," and write the opposite of what boring or annoying people do.

Where am I going with this? I guess I'm trying to tell you where I'm coming from when I write. Not all my pieces are winners, but they do provide a service and make people aware about things that could possibly improve their lives. But as I said I am a frustrated feature writer, so sometimes I get really inspired and write a decent story (even though I think the paper cut a big chunk at the end--something they do a lot), but most of the time, my stuff is boring. That frustration transforms into jealousy whenever I see a less (IMHO) talented writer get to write a column. I'm pretty decent; I don't suck; how come I don't have my own column?

So even giddy cannot describe how I felt when I saw that the local newspaper had accused a local animal shelter volunteer of plagiarism. But that joy didn't last long, because as I said, the newspaper runs press releases, word for word most of the time, just to fill in space. They even cut wire stories mid-sentence. But back to my point, I've copy edited this volunteer's stuff and I've read her stuff before and I could tell you without doing any research, that she didn't write a lot of that stuff. Not to mention claims in stories that any good editor would have cut out because they were libelous and these "stories" are clearly editorials and not labeled as such (Kimmie shout out).

Now the newspaper editor and publisher have punished this local volunteer, who just like everybody else, thinks writing a story or a column for the paper is easy. It's not. The hardest releases for me are the small boring ones because I have to give in and give up and write the damn thing in a passive voice and hope nobody ever judges me or what I write based on that.

But back to the writing process. It's like this: I surf the Web, find inspiration from other people, do my best to mask any inspiration, write, edit, and then print. Another difficult phase in the process is coming up with story ideas, but I think that comes with time and experience.

So to all who write columns for small newspapers without the benefit of even one journalism class, I no longer envy you.