Once, as I was being escorted around the Detroit Free Press newsroom, we bumped into a nationally syndicated columnist who was being given the VIP treatment.
Since I, too, was a guest, I had to bite my tongue.
A few weeks before, he’d ripped off the opening paragraph of our copyrighted lead story in the Yakima Herald Republic and opened his own column with it, nearly verbatim, without attribution.
As you know, that’s plagiarism – intellectual theft.
Despite heightened efforts to stem it, I suspect it’s long been part of the public information stream, to one degree or another.
Once, for instance, a small-town radio personality read my published concert review word for word over the air as if he had been there. Again, no attribution.
Or a Monday TV newscast read a photo page, without the photos, as if it was theirs.
More recently, we’ve had to shake our heads each time a certain television station says “W*** has learned,” because we know it’s code for “W*** read in this morning’s Union Leader.” At least they’d rewrite the story.
And then there were all of the charges and countercharges between the wire services and the big city papers, each accusing the other of taking stories and putting new bylines at the top.
But that could lead me to tell of my experience as a cub reporter at the Cop Shop (police station), where the rival newspaper ran my piece as its lead the next day. The reporter whose name appeared at its beginning had taken my carbon paper draft from the waste can.
So that’s how you learn.
Jnana's Red Barn 
Your stories make me thank my lucky stars I worked in a small city in a small island far away from the anxieties of cut-throat competition…there’s a lot to be said for it, after reading this !!!