September 10, 2009 – 8:00 am
I initially didn’t post about this story because it struck me as a tale of well-meaning aggregation gone wrong, but it seems that the issue was bigger than that. The bottom line is that the Hartford Courant has apologized for repeatedly and knowingly plagiarizing the work of its competitors.
Here’s an excerpt from a statement by [...]
September 8, 2009 – 8:00 am
A report from the Christian Science Monitor:
The world’s most infamous agent of nuclear proliferation, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, has added a fresh feather to his cap following revelations that a newspaper column he penned two weeks ago for Pakistan’s The News heavily plagiarized websites of British universities…
The newspaper column in question, “Science of computers [...]
September 1, 2009 – 10:14 am
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 [...]
The cover article of The Times Magazine on Sunday reported on whales and the possibility of interspecies communication between them and humans. The final two paragraphs of the article described an occasion in 2005 when a humpback whale became entangled in crab-trap ropes and was freed by a rescue team. Some of the language in [...]
Our report "Jools Holland’s castle joins band of at-risk monuments" (June 23) referred to Saltwood Castle in Kent and its owner Jane Clark, who has succeeded in having Saltwood removed from English Heritage’s at-risk register. The information and quotes about Saltwood were taken from an article by Robin Stummer in the latest edition of Cornerstone, [...]
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, [...]
On May 22, *The Toledo Free Press reports that columnist Maggie Thurber resigned after one of her columns was found to have included plagiarized material. From the story:
Thurber’s column for May 24, “A History of Memorial Day,” was accused by a contributor of SwampBubbles.com of containing plagiarized lines.
Upon learning of the accusation, Toledo Free [...]
Over the weekend, one of our readers pointed out that the “It’s a Snap” user travel Photo of the Week was, in fact, a copyrighted image. We have removed the photograph from our site, as the picture is the property of Scanlan Photography’s “Windows to the World,” viewable at http://www.scanlan.com. Link
A report from the Independent (UK):
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the tweedy Conservative candidate for the new parliamentary seat of North-East Somerset, has been caught red-handed trying to rip off the Sun newspaper in his latest campaign leaflet.
Rees-Mogg – who, as the son of the former Times editor Lord Rees-Mogg, should perhaps know better – admitted that a [...]
February 26, 2009 – 9:31 pm
Barney Gimbel, a writer with Fortune magazine, resigned after being shown evidence that he had plagiarized from an article in the New York Times Magazine. The New York Observer reports that Fortune will publish an apology in its upcoming issue, which is slated to hit newsstands on March 9. The apology:
In our Feb. 2 issue [...]
February 12, 2009 – 8:00 am
An article published on the New York Daily News’ website stole two paragraphs and two quotes from a story published on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News. Bob Richter, the Express-News public editor, described the theft on his blog:
An editor at nydailynews.com, the Web site of the New York Daily News, acknowledged Thursday [...]
December 4, 2008 – 9:27 pm
A report from the Globe And Mail (Sportsnet is a Canadian sports channel and website):
Rogers Sportsnet has pulled NFL commentator Chris Landry off the air and removed his column from Sportsnet.ca following an allegation of plagiarism.
Some of Landry’s columns on Sportsnet.ca have contained word for word passages from Internet pieces written by Mike Lombardi and [...]
Jody Rosen, Slate’s music critic, has written a remarkable story about a weekly paper in Texas that appears to commit plagiarism on a shockingly regular basis.
Rosen’s investigation into the Bulletin, a weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, began after he received an email informing him that his “… profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale [...]
Romenesko spotted this apology to readers from the executive editor of the The Daily Herald in Everett, Washington:
On June 3, this newspaper carried a column describing the travails of a girls’ basketball coach. Editors are deeply disturbed to learn that parts of the column were taken from a 2002 piece that appeared in Sports Illustrated.
This [...]
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs a wonderful show called Media Watch. It operates with the slogan, “Everyone loves it until they’re on it.” Why, that’s good enough to steal for this site. But that would be unwise because Media Watch is very good at exposing plagiarists.
In early March, it aired a scathing seven minute report [...]
March 21, 2008 – 11:40 am
Jeffrey Pijanowski, a former editor at Newsday, emailed me this week about an incident of plagiarism at the Sunday News, a newspaper in Lancaster, PA. A member of the community submitted a comment piece about same-sex marriage and the paper published on March 2. A week later, the News published a small “correction/clarification”:
“Same-sex Marriage: Not [...]
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 [...]
Last week, Slate’s Jack Shafer revealed that Times reporter Alexei Barrionuevo had plagiarized part of an article about cheap cocaine in Argentina. (Regret report here.) In response, the Times published an Editors’ Note but declined to detail the action it would take in response to the revelation. I wondered if this meant the Times would [...]
At the end of last week, it emerged that Timothy S. Goeglein, who until his resignation on Friday was the White House aide responsible for working with conservative and Christian groups, had plagiarized in one of his regular guest columns published in the News-Sentinel. Former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall* revealed the plagiarism. From there, it [...]
February 29, 2008 – 12:02 pm
Romenesko spotted this report from the Ventura County Star about a surfing columnist that was fired due to plagiarism:
The weekly column, Surfing Scene, by David Burroughs has been cancelled by the Ventura County Star because of evidence of plagiarism.
Burroughs, who was hired on contract to write the column, acknowledged that material in two of his [...]
February 28, 2008 – 5:41 pm
While preparing a column this week, Slate’s Jack Shafer stumbled upon an incident of plagiarism at the New York Times. Shafer wrote a column about the theft and the Times has now responded with an Editor’s Note:
A front-page article on Saturday described a cocaine epidemic in Argentina fed by the consumption of paco, an addictive [...]
February 14, 2008 – 8:00 am
A correction:
A story about the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s semiannual awards ceremony, which appeared on Page 2B of the Broward edition on Feb. 6, included several paragraphs that should have been attributed to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Details and quotations from the Sun-Sentinel story, including the comments of civilian honoree John Clark, were used in The [...]
February 12, 2008 – 8:00 am
IvyGate and Gawker recently noted a recent incident of plagiarism at the Brown Daily Herald. Here’s the editors note:
Last week, as part of its usual fact-checking process, The Herald discovered that two news articles scheduled for publication contained material taken from other sources’ reporting without quotation or attribution. The articles were never printed. The Herald [...]
January 25, 2008 – 8:00 am
An editor’s note form the New York Press:
It has come to our attention that some of the questions in this week’s debut of the New York Press’s new sex-advice column, “Lip Service,” were taken from past columns by Dan Savage, the nationally-syndicated sex-advice columnist and editor of The Stranger. The author of the column, [...]
January 23, 2008 – 8:00 am
The Torontoist blog recently put up a post noting the similarities between one of its articles and a subsequent one in the Toronto Sun. (Disclosure: I recently joined some of the Torontoist folks on the bloggers team for a broadcast of Test The Nation on CBC.) Some folks took to the comments section to object [...]
