![]() It’s way past time for USA Today and Universal Uclick to take a stand against plagiarism and for creators’ rights, and maybe it takes some creators to stand up for those. We thought that a newspaper of its size would be violently opposed to plagiarism. Some puzzle constructors and game designers even stated they would boycott both USA Today and Universal Uclick until appropriate action was taken: The puzzle community was unhappy with the reaction, and USA Today and Universal Uclick soon felt the pressure from constructors and content creators alike. Then, in early May, Roeder reported that Universal Uclick had completed its investigation, and despite the fact that they’d confirmed some of the allegations of puzzle repetition, they were only giving Parker a three-month leave of absence. We were among the first to report that constructor Fred Piscop would serve as editor in the interim, but after that, the story went quiet for two months. The article sparked an investigation, and a day after the story first broke, Universal Uclick (which owns both the USA Today crossword and the Universal syndicated crossword) stated that Parker had agreed to temporarily step back from any editorial role for both USA Today and Universal Crosswords. The story originally broke on data analysis website thanks to Oliver Roeder, but the real credit belongs to Tausig and Pwanson. ![]() Programmer Saul Pwanson and constructor Ben Tausig uncovered a pattern of unlikely repeated entries in the USA Today and Universal crosswords, both of which are edited by Timothy Parker.Įventually, more than 65 puzzles were determined to feature “suspicious instances of repetition” with previously published puzzles in the New York Times and other outlets, with hundreds more showing some level of repetition. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, you can click here for more detail, but here’s a quick rundown of what happened. This weekend marked the one-year anniversary of one of the biggest stories in puzzles: the USA Today/Universal Uclick crossword plagiarism scandal, aka #gridgate.
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