Photo by lovelypetal

Breaking news: Ocala, Florida, has an "award-winning lifestyle magazine."

Further breaking news: That magazine steals. A lot.

A local paper in Ocala (we assume it too is award-winning) has the story of how Ocala Magazine's editor, Heather Lee, was a enthusiastic plagiarist.

A story Lee "wrote" about her own upcoming wedding was "copied almost verbatim from a 2003 story written by New York writer Juliet Siler Eastland, published on indiebride.com," the Ocala Star-Bulletin reported.

"The Star-Banner verified that in many cases, paragraphs and portions of Ocala Magazine stories and columns had been taken from a variety of news outlets - The Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Oprah magazine and Entertainment Weekly to name a few."

Among the publications not mentioned: The Houston Press. Lee stole from a food review Robb Walsh did.

A restaurant review bylined "Allison Watson" began this way:

Meat lust is not pretty. But I suspect it grips all true carnivores on their first visit to a churrascaria. All that hot, dripping, bloody beefsteak, shimmering sausage and crusty tenderloin sends a steak aficionado into a frenzy of overordering. The first word of Portuguese you need to learn in order to optimize your churrascaria experience is não.

Here's a graf from a June 2006 review of Nelore Churrascaria by Walsh:

Meat lust is not pretty. But I suspect it grips all true carnivores on their first visit to a churrascaria. All that hot, dripping, bloody beefsteak, shimmering sausage and crusty tenderloin sends a steak aficionado into a frenzy of overordering. I know, I've been there. The first word of Portuguese you need to learn in order to optimize your churrascaria experience is não.

If you'll notice, the only words not plagiarized are "I know, I've been there." So we guess she gets some points for not crossing that line.

Lee told the paper that the pressure of putting out 17 editions a year caused her to make mistakes in attributing words to their proper author. An explanation which has most of the journalism world guffawing.

As for Walsh, he tells Hair Balls: "You'd think someone could have come up with their own impressions of how to eat meat."