Mark F. was good enough to send along this article to me. Rick Newman wrote the piece (on August 24) that so closely mirrors the piece written by myself, along with Eric Englund (on August 5). His opening paragraph mimics many of the exact same ideas from our opening paragraph, that I wrote, along with our footnotes.

Car sales are in a tailspin on account of $4 gas and a swooning economy, and as usual, the Detroit automakers are suffering more than their competitors. Overall, sales are down about 11 percent so far this year, according to J.D. Power & Associates. But at the Detroit 3, sales are down an outsized 18 percent. The biggest reason is an overreliance on big trucks and SUVs and a dearth of small cars that consumers actually like.

Read our article and then read this, and not only is the author riding right alongside our conclusions throughout our entire piece (with a few peripheral points of his own), but he’s writing with an eerily similar style, hitting the same catch points (gas prices, GM’s product mix, sales % numbers, etc.), and spelling out a parallel argument while trying to make his article a unique piece.

As an aside, I find this statement from the author to be surprisingly lacking in any substance:

Ford (F) has been hit hard, but looks to have enough cash to ride out a worst-case downturn and survive until 2010, when the market should rebound and recent labor cutbacks will start to pay off.

What is the financial case to be made for supporting the statement that Ford has enough cash to ride it out until 2010, and that the market “should rebound” in 2010? Is the writer just picking talking points out of thin air here? Or is he merely rolling up all what he’s read and heard into some apparent expertise on the matter?

In all honestly, the guy appears to have heavily borrowed from mine and Eric’s article. The reader, Mark F., noticed it immediately, and he didn’t even write the piece. You can see what Eric and I do: we drop in footnotes for major arguing points, and we credit sources of inspiration, such as Mike “Mish” Shedlock’s great blog. That is honest, creditable writing.

And I’ll leave it at that.