Snopes Suspends Co-Founder For Mass Plagiarism, Staff RevoltsThe last time Snopes Co-Founder David Mikkelson made headlines, he'd allegedly embezzled $98,000, dropped weight, left his health-challenged co-founder wife, and married an actual whore.
Five years later, and Mikkelson's just been suspended by Snopes after BuzzFeed uncovered massive plagiarism - including instructing other Snopes writers to 'cut-and-paste' mainstream breaking news stories without attribution, and then alter them after the fact.
In total, Mikkelson 'wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material,' under his own name as well as a pseudonym, and the Snopes byline. In addition, an internal review by the 'fact-checking' company identified 140 articles with possible problems.
Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.
“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.
"Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop," Marchionni added [ZH: and then not full-stopping]. "It has no place in any context within this organization." -BuzzFeedFormer Snopes managing editor Brook Binkowski told BuzzFeed: "He used to write about topics he knew would get him hate mail under that assumed name. Plus it made it appear he had more staff than he had."
"He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time. I hated it and wouldn't tell any of the staff to do it, but he did it all the time," she added.
In one Slack message from January 2016, Mikkelson detailed his strategy for copying and then quickly rewriting articles after publishing. “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up. Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized,” he wrote.
In two emails from 2014 and 2015, Mikkelson told staff to “pop over to one of our competitor sites (urbanlegends.com or hoaxslayer.com), pick something out that they’ve recently published that we haven’t covered,” and "rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement." -BuzzFeedAccording to two other former employees, "taking credit for other people's work" was "part of his model." Mikkelson's excuse? He's not a trained journalist.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/snopes-suspends-co-founder-mass-plagiarism-staff-revolts
