The daily newspaper in St. John’s, Newfoundland ran an apology on page A6 this past Friday. While it said the paper “discovered several articles that contain plagiarized material,” and mentioned that the offending reporter was no longer working for the paper, it still fell way short of a proper apology. It says there were “at least” seven articles published that contained plagiarized material, but doesn’t list the articles, describe the plagiarized information, or note where the information was lifted from. It also doesn’t name the reporter that committed the offenses.
The apology:
The Telegram would like to inform its readers that the newspaper has discovered several articles that contain plagiarized material.
After originally suspecting plagiarism in a story that was stopped by editors before publication, further investigation disclosed a pattern of improper behaviour by an individual reporter who is no longer with the newspaper.
From the newspaper’s further investigation, it appears at least seven other instances of plagiarism occurred in unrelated stories, by the same reporter, published over a period of several years. The information involved is background information that was copied verbatim from a variety of websites and other sources over that time.
While the information was not necessarily inaccurate, it was not properly sourced, and constituted using the work of other writers without attribution.
The Telegram regrets the misuse of this material.
We apologize to our readers.
