SlashNOT

Matthew writes: SlashNOT has recently discovered that many—perhaps hundreds—of technical news stories that it has posted were invented by one of its most trusted writers and editors. In numerous cases, the incidents described may not ever have occurred.

Michael, the other editor at SlashNOT, became suspicious of Matthew’s submission rate. “He was pumping out one, maybe two major stories per week. Per week. Think about that. With travel expenses, hotels, flights, etc., he would have had to have been on the road constantly covering every corner of the tech industry from Taiwan to the other side of Taiwan.”

“That’s when we found the story generator code on his company computer. This code took the first two paragraphs of a randomly selected news story from google news, replaced all the nouns with the nouns from a randomly selected post from Slashdot, and submited it. Apparently, Mathew would go through the submissions quickly and delete the most of the nonsensical ones, and post the rest. We’re going through the archives now, but it looks like about 50% of the stories we’ve posted may have come from this software.”

“I want to say to our dedicated readership that we are doing everything we can to rebuild trust and re-establish credibility with our core demographic. We also want to see Matthew get the help he needs. He’s still in denial right now, claiming that he thought he was supposed to make up these stories.”