Current mood:

accomplished

Today was the first day of my new job.

It was slow going at first, and then my associate producer and I came across a freelancer (I'm also a freelancer, but I'm also doing grunt work for a month) that had turned in his listings...rather early.

They were terrible. There were tons of grammar errors, spelling errors, factual errors, errors up the wazzoo. This guy couldn't write his way out of a junior high essay competition. My seventh grade sister could have written better articles. So the task I was given was to look over that guy's articles, and re-write and correct stuff as necessary.

A couple of the articles I pretty much had to re-write from scratch. They were THAT bad.

With all of these articles, I checked the venue's website that the writer had listed just to make sure everything had checked out. I had noticed with a few of these listings, this guy had pulled pictures off these websites, WITH SITE-SPECIFIC TEXT STILL ON THEM. Keep in mind, we are creating content for a brand-new website that is supposed to be original and professional. This was not professional. That was a bit fishy. We can use pictures from others' sites, if we get permission. I highly suspect that this guy didn't get permission, he just ganked them.

But this wasn't the biggest of his sins.

It was a good thing I had been checking out the websites of the venues, because I came across something that is one of the biggest no-nos in journalism: PLAGIARISM.

The guy copied nearly the entirety of his first paragraph word-for-word from the descriptive picture ON THE VENUE'S HOME PAGE. We can't be having that, nah. So he's out.



People think they can get away with anything, can't they?


And then I went to BJ's after work, where I had a beer and baked potato (always awesome).