Staunton’s News Leader fired sports reporter Blair J. Parker on Tuesday, October 23 for plagiarizing at least four stories from different internet sources, that paper reports this week. The article that triggered investigation into Parker’s work was about hunting and fishing and appeared on the front page of the paper’s sports section. "We have determined that the top section of the story was copied from an Illinois newspaper’s Web site," writes New Leader Executive Editor David Fritz. "The person who in our story was identified as working for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries actually works for a similar Illinois agency." The newspaper found other instances of plagiarism in local profiles that Parker wrote, including an October 19 piece on Andrew Koch. [The article has been retracted from The News Leader’s website. This is a Google cache of the original page.] While she stated, alongside his photo, that he was a UVA student and a Wahoo fan, Koch subsequently asserted in the newspaper’s online forums that this information was false and that his picture was the same one that appears on the website of his employer, James Madison University.
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