A contributor to Web Worker Daily has been fired after he stole a post from MakeUseOf.com. The site posted an apology last week: Earlier today, we posted an item written by one of our freelance contributors about little-used features of Gmail. What we did not realize was that the post lifted from an item published [...]
The Vancouver Province has canceled a column by Dave Pratt, a Vancouver radio personality, after it was revealed he plagiarized from a Sports Illustrated article. The paper announced his firing in an article published yesterday. …A reader alerted The Province to the plagiarism via e-mail after Pratt’s weekly column, called “Pratt’s Rant,” appeared in Tuesday’s [...]
Nate Lippens, a freelance art critic whose work has appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Stranger, has been exposed as a plagiarist.* Editor & Publisher has a story about his thefts, which were exposed by the Post-Intelligencer in a May 15 story and Note to Readers on the 14: Work in the Seattle P-I [...]
The Torontoist blog has an interesting story about a man, a would-be burglar, and a series of remarkable photos. Plus, a little bit of copyright infringement. In July of last year, Joel Charlebois, a Toronto resident, caught a man trying to break into his home. While trying to escape, the man fell from a second [...]
One of the poems that KidsPost published April 29 as part of its poetry contest was not written by the child who submitted it. The poem that appeared as “Horrible, Just Horrible” was actually written by Shel Silverstein and is titled “One Out of Sixteen.” The child who sent in the poem originally told KidsPost [...]
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 [...]
Last week, Slate’s Jack Shafer revealed that Times reporter Alexei Barrionuevo had plagiarized part of an article about cheap cocaine in Argentina. (Regret report here.) In response, the Times published an Editors’ Note but declined to detail the action it would take in response to the revelation. I wondered if this meant the Times would [...]
At the end of last week, it emerged that Timothy S. Goeglein, who until his resignation on Friday was the White House aide responsible for working with conservative and Christian groups, had plagiarized in one of his regular guest columns published in the News-Sentinel. Former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall* revealed the plagiarism. From there, it [...]
Romenesko spotted this report from the Ventura County Star about a surfing columnist that was fired due to plagiarism: The weekly column, Surfing Scene, by David Burroughs has been cancelled by the Ventura County Star because of evidence of plagiarism. Burroughs, who was hired on contract to write the column, acknowledged that material in two [...]
While preparing a column this week, Slate’s Jack Shafer stumbled upon an incident of plagiarism at the New York Times. Shafer wrote a column about the theft and the Times has now responded with an Editor’s Note: A front-page article on Saturday described a cocaine epidemic in Argentina fed by the consumption of paco, an [...]
A correction: A story about the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s semiannual awards ceremony, which appeared on Page 2B of the Broward edition on Feb. 6, included several paragraphs that should have been attributed to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Details and quotations from the Sun-Sentinel story, including the comments of civilian honoree John Clark, were used in [...]
IvyGate and Gawker recently noted a recent incident of plagiarism at the Brown Daily Herald. Here’s the editors note: Last week, as part of its usual fact-checking process, The Herald discovered that two news articles scheduled for publication contained material taken from other sources’ reporting without quotation or attribution. The articles were never printed. The [...]
An editor’s note form the New York Press: It has come to our attention that some of the questions in this week’s debut of the New York Press’s new sex-advice column, “Lip Service,” were taken from past columns by Dan Savage, the nationally-syndicated sex-advice columnist and editor of The Stranger. The author of the column, [...]
It appears that Radar magazine produces some very enticing content. Last year, a Chilean magazine plagiarized from Radar’s Toxic Bachelors feature. Then, this past Sunday, the London Sunday Times “inadvertently” plagiarized content from a Radar piece, “100 Reasons Why You’re Still Single.” A report from the Guardian: A piece headlined “50 Reasons Why You’re Still [...]
John McIntyre, the Baltimore Sun’s assistant managing editor for the copy desk, has written an excellent blog post about plagiarism and fabrication. McIntyre is the language and usage guru at the paper. He uses that knowledge base to offer up a list of ways to spot a plagiarist or fabulist. These should be provided to [...]
An alert reader pointed us to an apology contained in the Dec 31 issue of the Weekly Standard. The magazine admits that an article by David Satter contained “several passages…taken without attribution from Jonas Bernstein’s articles in the Eurasia Daily Monitor.” The magazine avoids the “p” word, but does include an example of an offending [...]
An Editor’s Note: In the Statesman’s Schools column on Wednesday’s Page B2 , the first three paragraphs of an item about school breakfasts were taken nearly verbatim from a news release by the Center for Public Policy Priorities. It is not the American-Statesman’s practice to print items from outside sources verbatim and without proper credit. [...]
This is the least enjoyable part of running this site, but we suppose somebody’s got to do it. Herewith, a month-by-month report of instances of plagiarism and fabrication in the press. Of particular note is the high number of incidents of plagiarism at student newspapers this year. A disturbing trend, to be sure. January A [...]
Our article on Ugandan guards working in Iraq, written for us by a freelance journalist in Uganda, was drawn substantially from an article published previously in Uganda’s Daily Monitor and written by David Herbert. We were, of course, unaware of this. We apologise to Mr Herbert, the Daily Monitor and our readers. Link This is [...]
Bruce Schneier, one of the leading thinkers in IT security, recently wrote a column for Wired.com in which he uses the example of corrupt NBA referee Tim Donaghy to examine systems that suffer from single points of failure. The same concept directly relates to journalism and accuracy. What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA [...]
This has already been a bad year for plagiarism at student newspapers, but this latest incident, spotted by Romenesko, is very surprising. A professor at the Missouri School of Journalism has lost his column in a university paper staffed by journalism students and faculty after admitting he committed “unintentional” plagiarism. From a story in the [...]
Editor’s note April 28, 2010: Harry Page subsequently sued the paper and its owner for character defamation, and he received a settlement in April 2010. Harry Page is not a plagiarist. Read more here. Talk about burying the lead. After spending the majority of his column chastising a television station and newspaper for lifting material [...]
A columnist at the Brown Daily Herald, a student newspaper, has been fired after editors discovered that six of his columns included plagiarized material. The same writer also plagiarized in a letter to the editor that was recently published in the New York Times. The Times published an Editor’s Note yesterday, and the student paper [...]
Blair J. Parker, a sports reporter at the News Leader in Staunton, Virginia, was fired on Tuesday after an internal investigation revealed she “fabricated at least four stories and plagiarized from other stories on the Internet.” Parker was suspended last week after a story she wrote was revealed to have been made up of parts [...]
