Yesterday morning, Cathy Resmer, a staff writer for Seven Days in Burlington, Vt., discovered some familiar content on Explore New England’s Vermont blog. (Explore New England is managed by the Boston Globe and its Web site, Boston.com, both of which are owned by the New York Times Co.) Matt Mahoney, a Burlington resident who had been hired to write the blog, was posting text and images snatched directly from Seven Days’ Web site. Resmer contacted Mahoney’s boss, Ron Agrella of Boston.com, who apologized for the theft, terminated Mahoney’s contract and promptly deleted the blog. Agrella also informed Resmer that he had found additional instances of plagiarism on the blog. “I think we should all be paying attention to who’s writing about our
circulation areas online,” Resmer tells AAN News. “I think it’s worth having somebody on staff who’s monitoring local
blogs. It’s a great way to find out what readers are saying, and in
this case, it helped us protect our material.”