A few years ago, Slate exposed a Texas weekly called the Bulletin for being perhaps the first newspaper to pursue plagiarism as a standard operating procedure. The paper published article after article that had been stolen from elsewhere. It closed down soon after being outed. So what will happen to Reader Magazine, “Southern California’s best [...]
An editor’s note from the Middletown Press: A staff-written article that appeared on MiddletownPress.Com Oct. 26 and in the print edition of the Middletown Press Oct. 27 contained significant portions that were identical to a previously published article reported by Middletown Patch. This violates both our policies at The Middletown Press, Journal Register Company and [...]
An advisory issued by Reuters on Friday: Please be advised that the Oct 27 Moscow story headlined “Chechen teen diary a bitter tale of bombs and survival” has been withdrawn because, though it included original reporting, it is too similar to a piece already published by The Guardian on the same subject to be appropriate [...]
Poynter highlights what appears to be a case of visual plagiarism by Urban Tulsa cartoonist David Simpson: The cartoonosphere is buzzing with talk of a new editorial cartoon published on Monday, Oct. 24, by The Urban Tulsa’s David Simpson. DailyCartoonist.com editor Alan Gardner says it looks a lot like an old editorial cartoon by the [...]
A letter from the editor of the Technician, the student paper at North Carolina State University I am dismayed to inform Technician readers of a case of plagiarism within the Student Media staff. Yesterday I received an email from a fellow college newspaper saying they suspected one of our staff columnists of plagiarizing a column [...]
A young reporter named Kendra Marr resigned from Politico last week after it was discovered she had plagiarized the work of other publications. She did it at least seven times. Politico’s top editors revealed the serial theft in an editor’s note published Thursday night. In typical Politico fashion, they moved quickly after being alerted to [...]
This lengthy editor’s note from Politico is notable for the fact that is never uses the word plagiarism, even though it’s explicitly about a case of serial plagiarism: … Late in the evening of Wednesday, October 12, the writer of a piece about transportation policy published in the New York Times e-mailed one of our [...]
A report from TheJournal.ie: THE IRISH EXAMINER has suspended one of its weekly columnists over serious allegations of plagiarism. Steven King, the newspaper’s regular international affairs writer, is accused of lifting lengthy passages for his columns from several sources, including British-based blog Spiked, website Salon.com and Commentary Magazine. The newspaper’s editor Tim Vaughan tweeted this [...]
An apology published by the Financial Mail of South Africa: An investigation by the FM has revealed that certain sections of the article “Dilemma about horns”, which was part of the magazine’s cover story titled “War on rhinos” in the September 9 edition of the magazine, were copied from a Bloomberg Businessweek article titled “Saving [...]
Via a blog post from the editor of ArchDaily, which had come under fire for plagiarising from Arch Record: … On September 18th, we featured a story titled “Harlem’s New Renaissance”. The article was taken from Jenna McKnight’s article “Harlem’s New Renaissance” featured on Arch Record on August 25th. ArchDaily’s article written by Irina Vinnitskaya [...]
So the Johann Hari saga has come to something of a conclusion. He apologized and will take a leave from the Independent from now until 2012. From his apology: I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I [...]
… Poynter’s Kelly McBride, who regularly gets phone calls from editors seeking advice on how to handle plagiarism/fabrication cases, said she found that more newsrooms started firing staffers for plagiarism following the Blair scandal. That seems to have changed once the economic crisis hit newsrooms. “Some editors these days seem more willing to overlook minor [...]
Denver Post sports columnist Woody Paige has apologized for using quotes gathered by SportsBusiness Journal and not attributing them to the publication. A report from Westword: Woody Paige wrote about one of his employers using a forum provided by the other one in “ESPN Empire One Great Story,” published in Sunday’s Denver Post. Problem is, [...]
Carol Wainio runs the Media Culpa blog, which frequently highlight errors made in Canadian newspapers. She also recently had a complaint against a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen upheld by the Ontario Press Council. She recently published a series of posts about Margaret Wente, a high profile columnist with The Globe And Mail, a national [...]
Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Post’s new ombudsman, hasn’t been on the job long but he’s already written about an incident of plagiarism at the paper. Here’s the editor’s note that was added to the offending piece: This article in the April 17 Travel section included material that was taken without attribution from a documentary [...]
The Washington Post today published an editor's note to admit that two articles about the Rep. Giffords shooting included plagiarized material: Two articles published by The Post online and in its print editions earlier this month contained substantial material that was borrowed and duplicated, without attribution, from The Arizona Republic newspaper. The articles described an [...]
Gawker has exposed a nasty practice at health and fitness publisher Rodale: … A tipster tells us that Zinczenko "copies and pastes" old Men's Health articles for his "Eat This, Not That" column for Yahoo! Health that runs under his byline. So we ran his prose through a search engine. We discovered that Zinczenko—whose cult [...]
In late December, the editor of Palo Alto Patch apologized for an incident of plagiarism on the site: We recently discovered that one of our freelance writers lifted information for one of his business reports from VentureBeat, an online news site covering technology and innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. While we provide all of [...]
A report from NBA FanHouse: An ESPNEWS anchor has been suspended for an unknown period for lifting portions of a newspaper column and using them in a script without attributing where the passage originated. Will Selva, an anchor at ESPN for three years, issued an apology Wednesday for taking all but of a few words [...]
Below is my annual, depressing list of 2010's incidents of journalistic plagiarism. Also note that this year I argued that news organizations should use plagiarism detection services, examined why they don't and also offered a guide to sniffing out plagiarism. Please email me if I’ve missed any incidents. January None! February The Merced Sun-Star published [...]
While you’re here, please consider purchasing a copy of the Regret the Error book, which won an award for media criticism from the National Press Club, and also contains hundreds of hilarious corrections. You can learn more about the book and read some reviews here. The paperback edition includes a new introduction. Error of the [...]
This one has already rocketed around the Internet, but if you missed it here's a summary from Salon: … writer Monica Gaudio, who was surprised to learn this week that the small culinary magazine Cooks Source had lifted her five-year-old story for medieval cookery blog Gode Cookery entitled "A Tale of Two Tarts" wholesale for [...]
A report from Japan's Mainichi Daily: The Asahi Shimbun national daily has apologized for running a story closely resembling one dispatched by the major news agency Kyodo News. "We couldn't complain if we're accused of plagiarizing the Kyodo story," a high-ranking official of the Asahi Shimbun's Osaka headquarters said. A 47-year-old reporter who wrote the [...]
If you're a would-be plagiarist looking for a place to pilfer, I'd advise you to think twice before stealing from Slate. Two years ago, Slate's Jody Rosen busted a Texas weekly for plagiarizing. And last week, another Slate writer, Grady Hendrix, revealed publicly that his work has been stolen by a magazine, India Today. Both [...]
The Portland Press Herald has fired columnist Leigh Donaldson because a recent column of his “contained a substantial amount of content from a column published on AlterNet.org that was used without attribution.” The paper published a very brief editor’s note, but it doesn’t detail whether the Press Herald will examine Donaldson’s previous work for other [...]
