Tuesday, March 6, 2007

OTHER MILEUX IN WHICH THE QUARRELS ARE SO VICIOUS BECAUSE THE STAKES ARE SO SMALL: As Deadspin has chronicled, the Boston Globe's Ron Borges slapped his own byline on a story with sizeable chunks cut-and-pasted from a Tacoma News-Tribune story about wide receiver Darryl Jackson's trade value. It got him suspended, but as it turns out it may have been just an extreme example of a very lazy, but accepted, practice.

Baseball Prospectus took a swipe (post deleted by USSM) at Derek Zumsteg, co-author of USS Mariner (the world's smartest single-team baseball blog) and a former BP writer, dismissing one of his earlier projections by saying "the guy who wrote that isn't with us anymore." Except maybe it wasn't meant to be critical of DMZ at all (thread deleted by USSM). Whatever it was, it drew a sharp defense from DMZ's friend, which in turn drew a threat of legal action by BP.

Film criticism site GreenCine deleted all of critic N.P. Thompson's work for it after a dispute over payment dissolved into what GreenCine called "threatening and harassing emails." Is the deletion of past freelance work in retaliation for a dispute concerning an unrelated article overly punitive? Or do you cut the site some slack because Thompson, the Reeler article says, is a master bridge burner and a guy with some strange ego issues -- like when he claims that the editor of Seattle free weekly The Stranger was "obsess[ed]" with him but "suppress[ed his] voice" because the editor read his blog but didn't ask him to work for the paper?

All this just proves that the Seattle-Tacoma corridor is the wild wild west of leisure-journalism clusterf---s.

Sources, because everybody is so litigious: Deadspin, USS Mariner, Matt Zoller Seitz's The House Next Door, and all the places they cited too.

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