As has become depressingly usual in UK media, here’s yet another lazy British media hack blatantly ripping off a US blog thinking no-one will notice. Do they not think we can use the internet?
From the Guardian’s Money Blog, 18 August:
The incredible grocery shrink ray – why what you buy is getting smaller
US blog The Consumerist has been covering this for weeks, a quick google for ‘grocery shrink ray‘ would have immediately revealed. The pages and pages of posts, all tagged ‘grocery shrink ray’ for the ease and convenience of researchers and readers.
Is it just too much effort for Guardian bloggers even to type a phrase or a word or two into a search engine and check it out before claiming it as their own?
I don’t know what it is; does being a proper paid writer – with qualifications and everything – on a proper newspaper (The Guardian! Woohoo!) magically elevate Sandra Haurant above such plebeian tools as Google?
Granted there is an acknowledgement of sorts but it’s to the wrong person.
Jeff Allder, policy expert at the National Consumer Council, says:
“In America it is known as the grocery shrink ray and this is one trend from the US that we definitely don’t want too much of over here.”
For someone with so much paid writing on consumer issues under her belt you’d think Haurant would know all about this trend in product sizing anyway, and know the blog too, with no need to google. After all The Consumerist is one of the big consumer issues blogs out there and any competent consumer journalist worth their salt would know that. To my mind this makes her lack of attribution or a link quite difficult to understand.
But then what do I know? I’m not a proper paid writer – editor even – on a proper newspaper and above such petty concerns as boring old plagiarism. I’m just another blogging oik, and things like that bother me.
