A contributor to Web Worker Daily has been fired after he stole a post from MakeUseOf.com. The site posted an apology last week:
Earlier today, we posted an item written by one of our freelance contributors about little-used features of Gmail. What we did not realize was that the post lifted from an item published three days earlier on MakeUseOf.com.
Giga Omni Media considers such behavior unacceptable. As soon as we were alerted to the situation, we removed the post, and we have terminated all professional relations with the contributor. We sincerely apologize to the employees of MakeUseOf.com, in particular to the original post’s author, Ellie Harrison.
We would also like to apologize to our readers. Please be assured that going forward, we will be working even harder to ensure that such breaches of both ethics and professionalism do not occur. We will also be much more selective about the contributors with whom we work.
Some of the comments on the apology point out that the Web Worker Daily post did not copy the MakeUseOf piece word for word, but that it stole the idea and included the same content. Web Worker was smart to terminate its relationship with Jason Harris, rather than let him continue to produce stolen posts.
The question, of course, is whether he did this with other posts? Also, the URL of the offending article now leads to a 404 error. WWD should point it to the apology.
