Thanks for being a regular reader. You can check out the award-winning Regret the Error book here.
A “Notice to Readers” on the paper’s website:
A Nov. 10 “New Global Indian” online column by New York City freelance writer Mona Sarika has been found to contain information that was plagiarized from several publications, including the Washington Post, Little India, India Today and San Francisco magazine. In the column, “Homeward Bound,” about H-1B visa holders returning to India, Ms. Sarika also re-used direct quotes from other publications, without attribution, and changed the original speakers’ names to individuals who appear to be fabricated. The column is the only work by Ms. Sarika to be published by the Journal, and it has been removed from the Journal’s Web sites.
A person named Mona Sarika, who also identifies herself as a NYC-based freelancer, blogs for the Huffington Post. Her name also appears at other publications, all of whom should review her previous work.
UPDATE Dec. 6: HuffPo and Foreign Policy, two publications that published work by Sarika, have removed her articles. Here’s the notice from Foreign Policy:
In her Oct. 30, 2009 article for ForeignPolicy.com, “Pakistan’s Coming Horror,” freelance writer Mona Sarika plagiarized and misattributed quotes from these sources (1, 2) on the BBC’s Web site and, we believe, may have fabricated her interview subjects. We have pulled the article and will not run work by Ms. Sarika again. We apologize to our readers. —Foreign Policy
And here’s what HuffPo has placed where Sarika’s blog posts once appeared:
Editor’s Note: Due to repeated instances of plagiarism and misattribution, both on HuffPost and elsewhere, Mona Sarika’s work will no longer appear on The Huffington Post.
And here’s a statement that Mario Ruiz, vice president of media relations at Huffington Post, told Virginia M. Moncrieff for a post that appears on, yes, the Huffington Post:
“Once we establish that a story or blog post has been plagiarized, we remove the story from our site and revoke the plagiarist’s right to ever post on The Huffington Post again. We also remove all other posts by that blogger and add a note as to why we’ve done so.”
“This has actually been a very rare occurrence over the four-and-a-half years we’ve been publishing,” he said. “Our policy on any factual inaccuracy (not just plagiarism) is that any time the factual accuracy of a post is called into question, a blogger has 24 hours to either back up their facts or correct the error. If they don’t, their blogging privileges will be revoked.”
That’s an interesting bit of insight into how HuffPo handles accusations of inaccuracy. But one thing that Ruiz doesn’t mention is the site’s policy for acknowledging errors. In this case, it provided an editor’s note, but the note doesn’t detail exactly what was wrong with Sarika’s work on HuffPo. What did she plagiarize, and what was misattributed?
