This has been an incredibly bad summer for the Telegraph-Journal, a newspaper in New Brunswick.
Early in the summer, the paper faced criticism for firing a summer intern under questionable circumstances. Then, in July, the editor and publisher had to step down after the paper started a national scandal by printing false allegations about the Canadian Prime Minister (background here and here).
Now? Plagiarism. A report from CBC.ca:
The Telegraph-Journal has apologized for its third error in the last few months after a reporter plagiarized a story from New Brunswick’s French-language daily newspaper.
Irving-owned Brunswick News Inc.’s flagship newspaper apologized in its Saturday edition for a story that it says a contract reporter translated from L’Acadie Nouvelle and filed it using her byline without attributing the source.
"The Telegraph-Journal expects its journalists to operate with honesty and integrity; a bare translation without credit or attribution is plagiarism and is contrary to the Telegraph-Journal’s core ethics and principles," the apology said.
The newspaper has terminated the contract of the reporter who filed the story …
I think the CBC’s report is somewhat misleading when it calls this the paper’s "third error in the last few months." Maybe I’m nitpicking, but I’m sure the paper has made other factual errors over the summer. Any newspaper would have. So perhaps it’s more accurate to call this the paper’s third "major" error, or third scandal?
The paper’s apology doesn’t appear to be online.:
The Telegraph-Journal published an article last Thursday on the economic spinoffs of the World Acadian Congress by Cheryl Norrad, a contract writer for the newspaper.
The writer translated the story for publication under her own name without acknowledging L’Acadie Nouvelle as the source. She was dismissed from the paper following an investigation.
While news and ideas are public, the words to convey them are not. The Telegraph-Journal expects its journalists to operate with honesty and integrity; a bare translation without credit or attribution is plagiarism and is contrary to the Telegraph-Journal’s core ethics and principles.
We deeply regret that this occurred and we will be taking steps to ensure this does not happen again.
We have apologized to our colleagues at L’Acadie Nouvelle without reservation and we apologize to you, our readers.
Thanks, Trevor!
