Thanks for being a regular reader. You can check out the award-winning Regret the Error book here.The Wall Street Journal published this correction yesterday: Two “Agenda” columns by Bill Jamieson, executive editor of the Scotsman, that appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe and on WSJ.com contained material copied from other sources that Mr. Jamieson [...]
April 28, 2010 – 11:28 am
In late 2007, I wrote a post about an incident of plagiarism at the San Antonio Express-News. I quoted from an article by the paper’s public editor that reported “… veteran E-N sports staffer Harry Page was terminated last week for lifting information — which he presented in his bowling blog as his own — [...]
During my recent absence, there were a few notable incidents of plagiarism and fabrication. Here’s a quick round-up: Fabricated interviews. The New Yorker carried a trio of pieces about an Italian journalist caught fabricating a surprisingly large amount of interviews with famous writers. And a German magazine also admitted that it had published a fabricated [...]
February 15, 2010 – 11:10 am
The New York Times published an editors’ note today revealing that business reporter Zachery Kouwe “reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment.” Here’s the note: In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, [...]
February 5, 2010 – 3:49 pm
Acting on a reader tip, Slate’s Jack Shafer busted the Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner for lifting from the Miami Herald: Veteran journalist Gerald Posner acknowledged today that he copied five sentences from a Miami Herald article this week for a piece he wrote for the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast appended an editor’s note to [...]
February 5, 2010 – 8:00 am
A letter to the editor that we published Wednesday, “Obama’s speech” submitted by Ron Gardner of Atwater, has been removed from our Web site. The letter was taken almost word for word from a column, “State of the Union: Obama v. Constitution,” by Mark Alexander on the Web site, The Patriot Post. Letters to the [...]
December 16, 2009 – 8:00 am
It’s a depressing job, but somebody’s got to do it. Below is my annual round-up of the year in plagiarism and fabrication. The good news is that there were fewer incidents than in 2008. Please email me if I’ve missed anything. January None! February New York Daily News reporter Rosemary Black stole two paragraphs and [...]
December 3, 2009 – 6:35 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
