The BuzzFeed investigation, which was published Friday, found that from 2015 to 2019 — under the Snopes byline, his own name and another pseudonym — Mr. Mikkelson published dozens of articles that included language that appeared to have been copied directly from The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, the BBC and other news sources. The investigation also identified cases in which entire paragraphs — and in at least one case, nearly an entire article — appeared to have been copied.
Copying text from breaking news stories on other sites was a strategy intended to scoop up traffic, the former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski told Dean Sterling Jones, the freelance journalist who broke the story for BuzzFeed News.
“That was his big SEO/speed secret,” Ms. Binkowski, who now manages Truth or Fiction, another fact-checking site, told BuzzFeed. “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.”
In a 2016 Slack message that was quoted in the BuzzFeed article, Mr. Mikkelson explicitly outlined this strategy. “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,” he wrote. “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.”
Even if he had rewritten the text a few minutes after publication, that would not be considered ethical under widely accepted journalistic standards. But as both the BuzzFeed investigation and Snopes’s internal investigation found, he frequently never got around to changing the sentences he had stolen.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-plagiarism-David-Mikkelson.html
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