JUST A LITTLE BIT, JUST A LITTLE BIT

JUST A LITTLE BIT, JUST A LITTLE BIT: In addition to the inability of the local newspaper to do things like get the story right and present it in an intelligible manner, other than the intrepid “photographer” Dennis Fujimoto- who is somehow able to be in both Wainiha and Waimea at the same moment- the others are among the laziest reporters in the world.

You can’t help but notice that the dispatches from courts and police beat “reporter” Paul Curtis seem to emanate solely from hanging around the courthouse and cop shop and recording and regurgitating whatever they dump in his lap.

But this Saturday might have been a new low according to a post from attorney-blogger Charley Foster.

Though Foster’s posts have been all too infrequent since he got his law license and stopped writing about local issues, something in Curtis’ article about the Hapa Trail controversy in Saturday’s newspaper forced him to feed the beast today.

Foster writes:

I'm informed some of my blogging appeared in Saturday's Garden Island. That's kind of exciting. It would be even more so if the paper had showed me some love by way of attribution.

He then posts a section of his April 2009 post listing six bullet points culled from a lawsuit, filed by Koloa activist Ted Blake, over “a case filed back in March of 2009 over the Knudsen Trust's planned Village at Poipu development.”

And lo and behold a look at Curtis’ article shows he plagiarized Forster’s bullet points word for word without attribution.

Foster is a bit more forgiving than to call it plagiarism saying:

Hey, I'm happy for the paper to reprint anything I've written on Planet Kauai. But I'd appreciate a little nod. Something along the lines of, "According to Kauai attorney and legal blogger Charley Foster..." would be nice.

We can accept the almost monthly article about an auto accident occurring within a hundred years of the local newspaper’s offices. They apparently cover all the news that happens between McDonald’s and the “76” gas station.

But when you lift a passage the difference between attribution and plagiarism IS that the latter is done without the former, as many authors of greater stature than Curtis have found out.