Regret the Error

Jack Shafer brings word of another incident of plagiarism at the New York Times:

New York Times Standards Editor Craig Whitney apologized to Manhattan Media this afternoon after today’s (March 11) Times lifted from a Manhattan Media story published on the Web and e-mailed to a media list yesterday.
The lift, taken from Manhattan Media’s City Hall piece about New York Lt. Gov. David Paterson, appeared at the end of a Times story about the succession process should Gov. Eliot Spitzer resign…
The Times article also reproduced a Paterson quotation from City Hall, which it did not attribute to City Hall.

Shafer’s column reproduces the letter Whitney sent to Manhattan Media and includes a response from David Blum of Manhattan Media, who isn’t fully satisfied.

“The key for me is that the Times accepted institutional responsibility for the transgression in near real time and apologized,” writes Shafer. “If only every case of plagiarism came this close to being settled this quickly.”

Update March 12: Here’s the Times Editors’ Note:

An article on Tuesday reported the reactions of political figures in Albany to the news that Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been a client of a prostitution ring. The last two paragraphs referred to remarks that Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson made at a breakfast meeting in October where he discussed his post, and it quoted him as saying he had been initially reluctant to attend a conference of lieutenant governors. The Times reporter and his editors were not clearly told by a contributing reporter that the quotation and the context had come from an article on the Web site of City Hall, one of the publications that organized the breakfast. The context should have been paraphrased and the information attributed to the site. Link

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