James Huang posted a series of instagram stories that Alvin Holbrook was fired from Velo for plagiarizing his State Bicycle Company Titanium All-Road review. I searched around and haven’t found any coverage of this anywhere other than the stories. I didn’t screenshot all of them, just the main stuff since this is kind of a long post with all of them.
James: If you want this to remain… temporary (in the spirit of stories) let me know and I will delete the thread.
Wow! It’s insane to me (and honestly a bit sad) that a professional journalist would choose to do this. This is a lesson you learn in middle school …don’t steal someone else’s work.
That’s a bad look for both Alvin and Outside. Especially since it’s the company where James used to work. I’m not well versed in journalism law. If it’s plagiarism and they don’t specifically state it was pulled from James’ intellectual property is there recourse?
Can’t tell from the screen shots…. It seems like they left the plagiarized article up (for “transparency) but did they just note it was not original and fail cite the original source?
They did add a small note but didn’t directly acknowledge it was just pure plagiarism.
“Editor’s Note: Portions of this article did not meet our editorial standards for originality and have been updated. We are leaving this article published for transparency.“
Amusingly the affiliate link to buy it still works…
Yeah, it would have been so easy to communicate with James, offer to pay him for the article or something, take it down and have someone else write a review, whatever. Just leaving it there knowing it’s immoral because it might generate a little revenue is a typical Outside decision.
Kind of a tangent, but people clearly dislike plagiarism. How do we feel about using AI to write? Seems almost as bad to me. Rather than stealing your ideas/writing from one other human, that is taking from a machine that has used the ideas/writing of many humans to learn how to then imitate what humans would write. Then you wade into the waters of, humans are also inspired by things they’ve read and styles of writing they like. It’s tough. But philosophically, I just kind of hate AI and don’t understand the desire to replace humans everywhere. This is very different than creating a printing press to do manual labor imo. Tangent finished.
Who would have thought it would be so hard for journalists to use their own…words?
Can’t imagine paying outside/velo or whomever for any subscription related to this type of garbage. Whether AI or plagiarism. As consumers we just can’t accept these behaviors and to me it’s another example of people losing sight of the plot.
I’ll happily contribute to true original objectivity in journalism, and happily reject lazy, regurgitated crap. After all, we do ride or participate in activities that are extremely demanding, time consuming, and technically challenging. Why would I be interested in any short cutting from those who pose as industry leaders or experts.
Plagiarism is obviously bad; this (further) hurts the editorial credibility of Velo/Outside and is just generally embarrassing. Obviously Alvin’s career in cycling journalism is destroyed, as it should be.
It’s even worse that they plagiarized James, a former writer for them who they let go as part of their whole consolidation/pivot to video/killing of real journalism to drive growth thing. He’s now a single guy running a (very good) Substack, so the optics of the failing VC-funded conglomerate stealing IP from him is particularly awful.
And third, what does this say about the quality of Velo’s reviews? If you’re stealing the key takes on a bike, did you even ride it? Which other reviews are just made up or written by AI? Was this the result of systemic defects in Velo/Outside’s content creation, e.g. Alvin signing off on a pre-written “story” not realizing it was plagiarized?
There’s video of him riding this particular bike on the YT channel, so I’d say it’s fairly obvious that he’s ridden it.
My guess is he had to flesh out a particularly comprehensive article (it’s seriously long), and lifted a handful of passages for the sake of hitting a deadline. Not saying it’s justified, but it’s a small piece of the entire article.
It’s crazy to think that anyone would be willing to plagiarize something from a colleague in such a niche industry. Surely you’d have to understand the consequences.
First off, yeah, this situation absolutely sucks all around. As it stands currently, Velo/Alvin was caught red-handed stealing my work, Alvin has instantly destroyed his career, and Velo/Outside has seemingly allowed its legal team to run the cleanup process instead of treating it like the massive PR disaster it’s created. This shouldn’t be hard. As already stated, they easily could have just fired Alvin (there’s no way he could have stayed, to be clear), publicly posted a sincere and personal apology to the offended party (not just me, to be clear), and quietly offered some sort of compensation for the affected parties. Even my 12yo understands how to genuinely say they’re sorry, and what Velo has offered instead is little more than obvious steps to try and limit their legal liability and preserve their commercial obligations.
In other words, it’s utter horseshit. And as a mountain biker at heart, I absolutely loathe horseshit.
Regarding the IG stories, I’m more than happy for this information to continue circulating, and I’ve already archived everything so it’s viewable 24/7: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18335865724236121/. I’ll also likely write something more formal sooner than later (probably after the holidays so I can maybe attempt to take a real break from this shit show).
Regarding Alvin’s actions, I only know of one of my articles for sure that he plagiarized; perhaps there are more, but I’m not about to waste literally days of my life digging through his back catalog to find out. That said – and you’ll excuse me for not providing details – this wasn’t the first time he “borrowed” content from me and others. I genuinely feel bad that I played a part in Alvin losing his livelihood, but at the same time, this is the bed he made for himself. As my kid put it to me last night, “You didn’t get him fired, daddy; he got himself fired.”
I wasn’t let go; I left voluntarily. In hindsight, I maybe should have pushed to get laid off since I would have at least gotten a decent severance package.
I’m sorry to hear this has happened, sounds a really bad thing for Alvin to do.
I find it shocking that they didn’t think this through and plan what would might happen.
From my perspective, I know I need to be aware of fake reviews that are paid for by companies, and potentially a favourable review from someone receiving free products. Now I need to be aware that actual companies may be reproducing reviews. I thought that was the AI worry, not a human copy worry!
I think the best thing I can do is give angryAsian a follow on the socials
