A college student interning at the Colorado Spring Gazette has been fired after the paper discovered she plagiarized from the New York Times in four recent articles. An editor’s note from the paper:
On Tuesday I learned that The Gazette has published four news stories during the past month that contain passages that are substantially similar, and in some cases identical, to passages in news stories originally published by The New York Times.
For this reason, reporter Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship in our newsroom, has been dismissed from The Gazette. The Gazette forbids plagiarism, which is the act of employing the creative work of someone else and passing it off as your own. None of the four Gazette articles attributed borrowed material to the Times, as is required when quoting the work of some other publication…
The paper lists the passages taken from the Times and concludes with this:
Every day, tens of thousands of citizens come to The Gazette and gazette.com in good faith, expecting from us in return that we will report the news as accurately, completely and originally as possible. That good-faith relationship is the foundation of all that makes The Gazette a viable enterprise. Without trust in our journalism, there is no business. For breaching that trust, I apologize to all Gazette readers.
When it comes to the integrity of our journalism, we owe you the same amount of accountability that The Gazette demands of public institutions in the name of their constituents. We will never be perfect, but we will always strive to live up to the principles of journalism and the trust placed in us by readers.
Thanks, Romenesko!
