This. How on earth you could have an explanation that's essentially "I relied on my memory to figure out the quoted cites after the fact that I deleted the cites because I couldn't find a fucking cite format" is insane. The dude pretty willfully plagarized as far as I'm concerned. I mean, seriously, fucking Google has this as their first hit for [cite online sources]: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html

Now, look, Doris Kearns Goodwin got nailed plagarizing, too. She did her penance, and now she's back on TV and everything after putting out Team of Rivals, which was seminal. Anderson will have to do something similar.

What's striking is that if you make it to the top of the profession, you can get away with this. If you're 28 and toiling to work your way up, it's a death sentence.

Screw 28, if you're a high school senior you'd miss graduation for something like this.

"Training as a journalist" is a joke. Pretty much every article I've had firsthand knowledge of has contained errors so egregious that it wouldn't take any training at all to have avoided them, only basic intelligence and diligence. Sorry, but that profession richly deserves its current collapse.

Given that, I find Anderson's screwup with footnotes no more objectionable than the critic's self-interested attempt to drum up a scandal out of it. It's not like the book gains anything by not citing a few Wikipedia articles; given its genre (popular economics) it would in fact be more convincing with them than without them. If it were claiming original scholarship it would be a different story.

Anyway, my point isn't really to defend authorial sloppiness in shallow throwaway bestsellers. I just didn't like the bait-and-switch in the gotcha piece. (Or its self-importance. "Investigation?" Please.)

Edit: ok, my conscience made me go back and reread the VQR piece to see if it was all that obnoxious. And it says it wasn't really and I have to add that here. In a footnote. :)

I always find this idea interesting, that newspapers economic woes have something to do with journalists getting worse at reporting the news.

When were "they" markedly better?

Aren't the executives more to blame here?

I'm not sure they were better. They might have deserved it for a long time. :)

The MSM does seem to be getting worse to me, but this might be an optical illusion - an effect of the contrast with how much better its emerging replacement is.

See, that's a valid view. People are welcome to think they're all getting what they deserve. I just don't think it makes sense to connect the quality or perceived lack of quality of today's mainstream journalism to the financial straights of the big media companies.

As someone who isn't a trained journalist, who cares? It's not like it makes the book any less good.