The offending story is online and doesn’t include this “clarification.” It also doesn’t include any credit or attribution to the Gulf News. The Gulf news story is here.

Here’s a quote from the Gulf News story:

“The claws on it were unreal,” said Mr. Parsons. “The quills had white colouring through them. There was no mistaking the quills,” he said.

The Post:

“There was no mistaking the quills,” Mr. Parsons says. “The claws on it were unreal.”

From there the Post and Gulf both quote Shelley Moores, a senior wildlife manager with Newfoundland and Labrador’s Department of Environment and Conservation. But the quotes appear to be different, and to be fair the Post story also added other sources to its piece.

Still, why bother issuing a clarification if you don’t add it to the online version as well?

Thanks, Doug!

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, three quotes in the piece appeared word for word in a SportsBusiness Journal article from April written by John Ourand, who called out Paige on Twitter. Today, Paige is offering his apologies.

“It was not done maliciously or to take credit for something I didn’t do,” Paige stresses. However, he adds, “It was my mistake.” …

“We’ve agreed that the columns would be shorter, and my column was about six inches too long,” he says. “So I cut six inches — and in the final column I turned in, I improperly, incorrectly and unprofessionally cut the attribution to the SportsBusiness Journal.

“I knew Bill Daniels and wrote about him,” he continues. “He was a friend, and he told me about that stuff — but I didn’t have a direct quote. So doing my due diligence, I found that quote from Mr. Maxwell, who I knew was from Denver, and I thought it added to the fact that Bill Daniels was very instrumental in helping ESPN, and also that ESPN was thinking very seriously about moving here years and years ago. So I put it in — but then I screwed up the entire column by not attributing the quote.”

How is he trying to make amends?

“I talked to John and I apologized to him,” Paige allows. “I told him it was a mistake, and he accepted that and said he enjoyed the column.”

A correction will run in the paper and the Post also added this note to the online version of the column:

Note: This column has been updated from its print version to include an attribution.

If the print edition deserves a proper correction then so does the online version. The above is frustratingly vague.

Via Romenesko.

She recently published a series of posts about Margaret Wente, a high profile columnist with The Globe And Mail, a national newspaper in Canada. (Disclosure: I was a columnist and blogger for that paper for close to two years and have also contributed freelance articles.)

Wente’s work came under scrutiny a couple of years ago after the NYTPicker blog pointed out some similarities between her work and that of a column by Maureen Dowd. (Also see this related piece.)

Last month Wainio brought forth more examples where Wente used quotes and sentences from other people’s work without attribution. The on May 31 she came up with yet another example, this time showing that Wente stole a line from a New York Times article. Up until recently the Globe hasn’t really acknowledged Wainio’s concerns and examples. Then on Friday it issued a correction for the example from the New York Times:

The words “Americans…are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them” in the Focus section of March 12 should have been attributed to Dexter Filkins in the New York Times.

To which Wainio asks: “Now, why not the rest?”

It’s a fair question. Wainio has offered plenty of other examples from Wente that fall into the same category as the Filkins line. The lack of clarity from the paper makes it seems as if there isn’t a clear attribution standard for columnists/journalists at The Globe And Mail.

As for Wente, she sometimes toes the line of what constitutes an acceptable rewrite, but there are other instances where she plucks quotes and words from elsewhere without offering proper attribution.

January

None!

February

New York Daily News reporter Rosemary Black stole two paragraphs and two quotes from a story published on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News. Link

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. Link

March

None!

April

Erwin James, the nom de plume used by a convicted murderer who writes regularly for the Guardian, admitted that he fabricated parts of a 2006 Guardian article about his experiences in the Foreign Legion. Link

*A student named Nicole Sobel plagiarized several sections of a New York Times op-ed for her column in the University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian. She was subsequently removed from the paper’s staff and the paper apologized. Link

May

Maureen Dowd admitted to a using a sentence taken from Talking Points Memo. She later explained that the words had been provided by a “friend,” suggesting that she meant to copy it from him/her. Link

June

Toledo Free Press columnist Maggie Thurber resigned after one of her columns was found to have included plagiarized material. Link

Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson admitted that a “screwup” resulted in his book, Free, including multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. Link

Kris DeRego, the news editor at Ka Leo, the student paper at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was fired after the paper looked through his previous work and found a trail of fabricated sources. Link

July

Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship at the Colorado Springs Gazette, was fired after the paper discovered she repeatedly plagiarized from the New York Times. Link

Cotswold Life magazine apologized after revealing that its January and February issues included material taken from SoGlos.com. Link

The New York Times Magazine published an editors’ note to detail that a feature by Charles Siebert included language taken from an email message. Critics were quick to note that a similar transgression by Maureen Dowd resulted in a correction, rather than an editors’ note. Link

The Times (U.K.) apologized after an article failed to attribute information to Cornerstone, the magazine of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Link

The Telegraph-Journal of New Brunswick issued a front page apology to admit that it fabricated an accusation against the Canadian prime minister. Then, in September, it apologized to Monsignor Brian Henneberry for fabricating a quote from him in the same report.

August

None!

September

The Telegraph-Journal of New Brunswick apologized after Cheryl Norrad, a “contract writer,” plagiarized a story from the province’s French-language daily newspaper. Link

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known for playing a significant role in nuclear proliferation, was found to have plagiarized in a column he wrote for The News. Link

After facing a barrage of criticism, the Hartford Courant apologized for repeatedly and knowingly plagiarizing the work of its competitors. It was later sued by another paper. Link

October

None!

November

The Guardian published a correction to note that it “failed to acknowledge South Africa’s Sunday Times as the source of an article about a passenger on a South African air force flight who was catapulted into the sky when his ejector seat fired.” Link

December

Mona Sarika, a freelance writer, was revealed to be a serial plagiarist. Her work for Foreign Policy, the Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal included stolen (and fabricated) material. Link

*Editor’s Note: This entry was added on the afternoon of Dec. 16. Thanks, Steve!

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, the magazine of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, but that attribution was cut from our reporter’s original copy in the editing process. We apologise for the error and for any embarrassment it has caused.

*Correction July 21: The word plagiarism was misspelled in the original version of this headline. Thanks, Charlene!

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.
i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.
but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Here’s the correction that was appended to her column:

Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Among others, Gawker has a look at Dowd’s excuse for her failure of attribution:

Who is this mysterious friend who helps Dowd limp across the finish line of the marathon that is two 750 word columns per week for the Times? Was the conversation in question over the phone, in which Dowd would have written down her friend’s words in a note, or was it via email or instant messenger, where perhaps there’s an electronic record of the exchange? And finally, why was Dowd needing help expressing the thought contained in the passage in question, a sequence of words which, with no disrespect directed at Josh Marshall, don’t seem all that remarkable. It’s a point well made with words, for sure, but it’s not something that couldn’t have been expressed in a number of different ways.

It is remarkable, and not in a good way, that Dowd was given the idea by a friend and then ended up writing it almost exactly the same as it appeared on TPM. It seems strange. That said, failures of attribution do occur, and they always raise suspicion. (Sometimes, failure of attribution is cited to cover up actual instances of plagiarism.)

The Guardian had a recent failure:

An article about Adam Carroll, A1 Grand Prix championship driver, published online under the heading Adam Carroll aiming for formula one after A1GP success, 5 May, failed to acknowledge that the quotes from Carroll used in the piece came from an interview by Will Buxton published in the 4 May issue of GPWeek, an online magazine. We apologise for this lapse.

Which makes this Guardian error about the Dowd story all the more interesting/amusing.