Topic: More on CoinTelegraph from a former writer. (Read 548 times)

Having discovered this, I went to the management and informed them that we would have to let Bogdam go. Instead of firing him , they asked me to “teach” him not to plagiarize. Surely, by the time someone is in their mid-twenties and is working for a media organization, he should know not to copy & paste other articles. There are multiple examples of articles by him, still present on CoinTelegraph, that include plagiarism.

After confronting and educating Bogdam, I put extra effort into checking each of his articles. His next article was again plagiarized, this time with the grade-school method of copying an article sentence for sentence but changing a few of the nouns and adjectives around in hopes of throwing off any sleuths. I explained to him again that this is unacceptable and stressed my technique of taking notes from articles and then re-writing from those notes rather than from the articles themselves. Again, I reiterated to CoinTelegraph’s management that he needed to be fired immediately, for the good of CoinTelegraph and for every other writer that works there.

Plagiarism is the most toxic thing you can do in the industry and if you are caught, the blow back doesn’t just get on the writer who wrote the article but it also reflects badly on every writer who writes for a publication that would allow that.

After weeks of arguing with management, they finally fired him. They never admitted to me that the firing was because he was caught plagiarizing. One day he was there and the next, they quietly informed us that he wasn’t writing for us any longer. They never thanked me for preventing an potentially embarrassing situation for the site. Instead, I got the feeling that they were annoyed by my (relative to the editors that came before me) stringent standards.

But not plagiarizing isn’t a stringent standard, it is the lowest possible place you can put the bar, and CoinTelegraph has not raised that bar since. As recently as August 5, CoinTelegraph published an article with plagiarized elements. The original’s author contacted me because according to him, rather than pull the article after he contacted them about it, they offered him a job, at a time when they are having trouble paying their current stable of writers. The plagiarized article remains up. They added a bit about it being “inspired” by a Reddit post, but that is not an acceptable way to deal with plagiarized material.