#Color me surprised crossword professional#
#Color me surprised crossword series#

Parker’s crossword ventures, according to a 2003 article in People, made him a “multimillionaire.” Its other clients include CBS News, Merriam-Webster, Smithsonian Magazine and Yahoo. In 2000, Parker earned a Guinness record for “most syndicated puzzle compiler.” There’s no public list of Universal’s clients, but its newspaper clients include the New York Daily News, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Denver Post and Hartford Courant. Parker has been the editor of the Universal Crossword for over 15 years and began editing the USA Today Crossword in 2003. It’s unethical, and I would never publish a person who plagiarizes another person’s work.” “This would never have come to light except in the electronic age, where you can track these things.” He added: “To me, it’s an obvious case of plagiarism. “I have never heard of something like this happening before,” he told me. Will Shortz, the puzzle editor for The New York Times, was taken aback by Parker’s replications. FiveThirtyEight reached out to USA Today for comment several times but received no response.ġ,090 Universal puzzles and 447 USA Today puzzles were at least a 75 percent match to an earlier puzzle On Friday, a publicity coordinator for Universal Uclick, Julie Halper, said the company declined to comment on the allegations. (The copyright to both puzzles is held by Universal Uclick, which grew out of the former Universal Press Syndicate and calls itself “the leading distributor of daily puzzle and word games.”) USA Today is one of the country’s highest-circulation newspapers, and the Universal Crossword is syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and websites.

#Color me surprised crossword series#

Nearly all this replication was found in two crosswords series edited by Parker: the USA Today Crossword and the syndicated Universal Crossword. Most of those have been republished under fake author names.

Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier. Since 1999, Timothy Parker, editor of one of the nation’s most widely syndicated crosswords, has edited more than 60 individual puzzles that copy elements from New York Times puzzles, often with pseudonyms for bylines, a new database has helped reveal.

#Color me surprised crossword professional#

A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.