The Hartford Courant

The leading source of dead-tree news in my neck of the woods, the HARTFORD COURANT, has apologized, although in rather lawyerly language rather than in any terms that would be satisfyingly abject, for repeated plagiarism.

[This is not breaking news, BTW. Anyone who wants breaking news should go elsewhere. This is my blog, I'll get around to things when I do.] Anyway, last week the Journal Inquirer's managing editor, Chris Powell, complained in a letter to the publisher of the Courant, that the latter had been "misappropriating on a wholesale basis local stories published in the Journal Inquirer." It appears that this has been going on since July.

Last weekend, Jeffrey S. Levine, the Courant's senior vice president, said in a statement that the paper in the past month has been experimenting with new strategies regarding the "aggregation" of news. They were trying to be hip and google-like. In the process, they forget some rules they should have learned in kindergarten.

"While attribution to the JI of the occasional big story we have broken may be welcome, the Courant's frequent use of the JI's work to report ordinary events in the towns in which our circulation overlaps is not welcome -- it's theft of copyrighted material and costly to us," as Chris Powell put it.

There were five other papers, aside from the JI of Manchester, that have apparently been ripped off in all this aggregation.

That isn't the only pile of crap the Courant has stepped into lately. It has placated Sleepy's, a chain retailer of beds and matresses, and a major advertiser, in a way quite pathetic.

George Gombossy has served as the consumer advocate columnist, under the heading "Watchdog," at the Courant for many years. In that capacity, he wrote a piece about a state investigation that Sleepy's may be selling mattresses with used boxsprings, selling them as new.

That's precisely the sort of thing they were paying him to write. Hence the term "Watchdog."

Apparently, not enough of a lapdog, though. He's been fired.

Here's his final column

and here is his website, where he proposes to carry on with his life's work.