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 to the blog’s accusation of plagiarism against the Sun writer. But it appears the Sun agrees that the relevant paragraph was taken from Torontoist. The Sun’s correction/apology:
A story in the Sunday Sun about a local guerilla artist known as Posterchild contained a paragraph which was not attributed to torontoist.com. The Sun apologizes for the error.
Torontoist followed up:
…we promised that we would issue a full apology to Jenny Yuen, the writer of the Sun’s article, if she was not responsible for copying the paragraph from Torontoist that appeared in her article. (At the time, we were concerned––as many of our readers were––that there was a possibility that the paragraph in the article may have been added by an editor or copy editor.) After dialogue today with the Sun, we’ve determined that an apology is not necessary.
Today, we offered Jenny Yuen an opportunity to issue a statement, which we would publish, unedited, with this post. On Sunday, she claimed in an e-mail to us that the paragraph in her article was not copied from Torontoist, but she declined to comment today and instead directed all questions to the Sun.
We understand that this is a very serious matter––plagiarism and accusations of it always are. We are satisfied with the Sun’s statement, and Torontoist now considers the matter closed.
It seems as though the paragraph was not inserted by a copy editor, but the Sun’s brief correction doesn’t make this clear. Nor does it note if the publication took the time to examine the guilty party’s previous work for other, ahem, failures of attribution. Why not make the effort to reassure/inform readers?
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The saddest thing about all this is that this reporter was given a second chance at least once in a past life for plagiarism. I hope her current editor isn’t as forgiving as I was.
Even more sad then your lame attempt to continue something that was deemed closed by both the Sun and Torontoist? If you’re an “old editor” of the reporter, why not post what publication you supposedly worked for?
Habs inside/out site and its g;orifoed fans want the Leafs out of the league for embarrassing our country.
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[...] from a blog post of theirs two days earlier. Though the blog considers the matter closed, Craig Silverman does his usual complaint that the apology is too brief, doesn’t explain how the error occurred and doesn’t say [...]