Bleacher Report Has Stiffer Penalties For Plagiarism Than ESPN Does

We uncovered more than a dozen of examples of ESPN senior writer Lynn Hoppes copy-and-pasting from Wikipedia and he was not fired. Instead ESPN gave him a slap on the wrist, and he hasn't written anything since—maybe he was suspended, or told to keep a low profile for a little while.

In any event, whatever calculus ESPN has dreamed up to deem Hoppes's act an example of "journalistic laziness" but nothing more, Bleacher Report would like to remind you that there would have been far greater consequences at its site:

This is the sort of thing that will get you fired from B/R if you're an employee, or your publishing privileges removed permanently if you're in the writing program. It's fine to use Wikipedia for background material, but you have to follow the information back to the primary source that Wikipedia cites and attribute that if you use it. And you can't just copy the text.

If anyone at ESPN would like to consult Bleacher Report's standards-and-practices guides, they have lots of links on how best to handle a situation like this.

[Bleacher Report]