Australia's David Richards, not a journalist so much as a plagarist

David Richards (r.). Would you buy advertising on this guy's site?

Regular readers should take a walk over to the blog of Jason Unger, who is my editor at CE Pro. Jason has written a very thorough expose of Australian technology journalist David Richards, who owns and runs a site called Smarthouse.

He's also a serial plagiarist, with a long history of stealing other people's articles and re-writing them under his byline.

He came to my attention, because he stole one of my articles.

Jason Unger: David Richards, Technology Journalism's Biggest Plagiarist

I was first tipped off to Richards' plagiarism by Lee Distad, a contributor to CE Pro, who saw that a story he wrote
("How the Format War Affects Custom Shops") appeared onSmartHouseNews.com.au.
The article, given a new title of "Are You Making Money Out of the Format War?", has Richards as the lead writer in the byline, with Lee given second billing. The two stories are nearly identical.
We gave him no permission to publish the story, and given that Lee wrote the story, Richards' byline is completely unwarranted.
It's straight-up plagiarism.
Richards has plagiarized other stories from CE Pro, including at least one that I wrote. At least two of the stories (originals here and here) have his sole byline (copies here and here).

If you Google for him, you find out that he has a long and sordid history of stealing content from other websites.





I've invested too much time in criticizing this jerk already. Instead of ranting further, I'll echo Jason's conclusion:

Richards is a disgrace to journalism and should be shunned by the technology industry — journalists, manufacturers and marketing folks alike. I agree with Robert Scoble, who called for Richards to be fired after his Vista-rewrite story. Can him.
On SmartHouseNews's site right now, there are advertisements from Pioneer and Mitsubishi. You are decent companies, but you shouldn't support publications based in plagiarism. Please consider dropping your advertising.

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