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Lemak Lemang

A walk down the Yellow Brick Road of Malaysia's Corridor of the future

by Jeff Ooi, Malaysia

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Blogs and bloggers hasten group editor's exit

Nov 2, 2006 11:11

The New Straits Times yesterday announced that Brendan Pereira will end his tenure as the newspaper's group editor on December 31.

SOURCE: The New Straits Times, November 2, 2006

The news broke just 48 hours after the senior journalist was outed by twio Malaysian bloggers--Rocky's Bru and yours sincerely--for suspicion of plagiarizing an article by Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom, published on September 10 to reflect on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

In the last two years, there had been many rumors about Pereira leaving The NST, but he stayed on because, according to media sources, the Prime Minister still needed his service.

However, this time, media practitioners and Kuala Lumpur-based foreign correspondents I spoke to largely believe that Malaysian bloggers and blog commenters have hastened his exit in the midst of the present controversy.

Pereira was the Kuala Lumpur bureau chief for Singapore Straits Times before he joined the New Straits Times, Malaysia's third-largest newspaper by circulation, in 2004.

In Pereira's column published on October 31, in which the editor reflected on the political standoff between Malaysian former and incumbent Prime Ministers, a total of eight spots were detected that showed him lifting Albom's words, ideas and framework without making proper attribution.

I have made a para-by-para comparison of the two articles. Albom's column is PDF-ed here, and Pereira's is available here.

Meanwhile, Sharon Bakar, a British blogger/writer who has lived in Malaysia for over 20 years, has given her perspective on the line drawn between plagiarism and parody/mimickry.

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About Jeff Ooi

Jeff Ooi is an Internet and e-Business consultant based in Kuala Lumpur who's spent the last four years blogging internationally on the tech scene, on anything and nothing. Which doesn't really explain why most of his own technology is about three years out of date. He doesn't even own a PDA after his Palm V crashed. He's on 3G, though... Lemak Lemang refers to coconut-flavored sticky rice stuffed in a bamboo container.