It has come to our attention that Gordon Werner’s post last week, “BNSF, Washington State to Pioneer HSR Negotiations,” is substantially plagiarized from Fred Frailey’s article in Trains magazine.
I’ve pulled the offending text in the original post. Although we are not professional journalists, we take this kind of thing seriously and will conduct a short investigation to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. We apologize to our readers, Trains magazine, and Mr. Frailey.
Upon further reflection, the recent post on extending the North Link tunnel, while it does cite the source, does not meet our internal standards for quoting other sources. It has been modified accordingly.
Very high integrity, especially by a blog.
Good move Martin – thanks for helping us be aware.
Excellent call, good work Martin. I appreciate the high standards that this blog tries to attain.
Good move, but I hope this can be a minor instructive experience and we’ll still see train posts from Gordon!
I agree. Gordon is a good writer, especially considering his age. I think he is a great addition to the rest of the front-page posters.
Considering some so-called “professional” journalists have committed far worse sins of plagiarism and failing to properly cite sources I think this calls for a “teaching moment”.
Very true! Gordon is a great writer, and we see this a lot from blogs and newspapers and it’s great to see a blog take it seriously.
That does it, I am only supporting road projects from now on
:-)
Oh and kudos, for the apology and correcting the problem as soon as you were aware of it. One wishes all blogs and even traditional media had as much integrity.
Thanks for taking this so seriously and making the apology so public. It would have been easy to just make the changes on the original post.
Also, I agree on the “teaching moment” comments made above.
Good job Martin. It is important for a blog to show its sources. Original writing and ideas are what make a blog interesting to read.
The HSR plan sounds like a great idea regardless of who wrote about it.
A Seattle Spokane route would be fantastic as it opens up tremendous growth opportunities.
I would forget entirely all the Seattle centric projects like the viaduct and 520 and put all our resources into 200mph+ trains East-West across the state.
Especially since Seattle is depopulating and has only 100,000 people now, and all the people have moved to Ellensburg and Wenatchee and Spokane. Boeing has a new plant in Wenatchee, Microsoft’s headquarters is now in Moses Lake, and Amazon is at the Grand Coulee Dam.
Thank you for such integrity.