Guido thought Charles Arthur’s Guardian piece on the Natwest meltdown yesterday looked familiar. The article bears a suspiciously close resemblance to a post published three hours earlier on tech website The Register. Arthur’s story claimed that a Guardian investigation had uncovered details of a key software component going wrong at the bank. They say “investigative journalism”, Guido says reading it on the Internet…
The two articles even bear striking similarities in terms of structure, with the Arthur piece following The Register‘s story almost line by line. Lazy.
UPDATE: Former staff explain the decline in the Guardian Technology section:
@MediaGuido It all went downhill after @jackschofield left…
— Darryl Murphy (@darryljoemurphy) June 26, 2012
@darryljoemurphy @MediaGuido Well, Bobbie Johnson and @kevglobal also took voluntary redundancy; @RickWray and @KateBevan found other jobs.
— Jack Schofield (@jackschofield) June 26, 2012
@jackschofield @darryljoemurphy @MediaGuido @kevglobal @RickWray And none of us have been replaced. Fewer reporters = poorer coverage.
— Kate Bevan (@katebevan) June 26, 2012
@katebevan @jackschofield @MediaGuido @kevglobal @rickwray V good point. Decent stuff hard to do if a smaller team's always fighting fires
— Darryl Murphy (@darryljoemurphy) June 26, 2012