[eridius]

Hi Nick,

I get the impulse to defend the company you work for. It's commendable. But if you're embarrassed to see your employer be accused of plagiarism, it would be a lot more effective for you to pressure people internally to start providing proper attribution than to write comments like this. Internal pressure can often accomplish things that external pressure can't.

[nickbauman]

Good point. However, BuzzFeed's record on plagiarism is also being painted here with a very broad brush. The real occurrences of plagiarism at BuzzFeed is not out-of-keeping with normal attrition at major media dailies in the US media. Every news organization has had issues with it at some point or another. BuzzFeed is no different.

That said there's definitely always room for improvement.

[eridius]

I'm familiar with BuzzFeed's other "articles", and I've seen plenty of attribution there (e.g. articles that basically come straight from reddit, with each bullet point attributed to a reddit username, that always amuses me). I haven't actually watched any of the Tasty videos, so I haven't had a chance to see for myself if and when they get attributed, but if Kenji López-Alt is raging about Tasty on Twitter, then I have to assume there's a bit of a problem there.

[nickbauman]

However, when he first saw BuzzFeed’s recipe, published on their food site called Tasty, in May of this year, he said the ingredient list was nearly identical “with a few tweaks”. — Kenji López-Alt

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-ac...

You can't copyright a list of ingredients.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/03/24/recipes-copyright...

[eridius]

And that's why he's not suing them for copyright violation. But just because something isn't a copyright violation doesn't mean it's not plagiarism, and doesn't mean that you shouldn't provide attribution.