Tag Archives: Plagiarism

Hartford Courant apologizes for repeated plagiarism*

September 10, 2009 – 8:00 am

hartfordcourantI 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 by the paper’s publisher:

Throughout our history we have served the community by highlighting wrongdoing and violations of ethics when we find them. It is only right that we focus the same light on ourselves when we are wrong.

So, it’s incumbent upon me as publisher to tell you that we failed to meet our own standards and, as we would with anyone else, we are flagging it, calling it wrong and taking action.

In short, after an extensive internal review, we have determined that over the last several weeks The Courant plagiarized the work of some of our competitors. This was not our intent, but it is in fact what happened. We are taking corrective action to prevent it from happening again. We have also disciplined the individuals involved.

There’s not much detail there, so here’s a nut graf from Editor & Publisher:

Last week, Chris Powell, managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., complained in a letter to Graziano that the Courant had been “misappropriating on a wholesale basis local stories published in the Journal Inquirer” since late July, according to a Journal Inquirer report. Jeffrey S. Levine, the Courant’s senior vice president and director of content, said the letter prompted the Courant’s review of its aggregation practices.

AP also has some good background. Finally, a blog maintained by former Courant staffers offers additional details, including an internal memo that describes some fairly outrageous behavior (emphasis mine):

It is and has always been our policy to offer proper attribution. Over the last few weeks, The Courant carried several news stories in which the original news source attributions were removed and credit was given to a Courant staffer.   This was plagiarism.  It happened on our watch. Disciplinary action for those involved, including ourselves, has been taken today.  We’ve put procedures in place to insure that these mistakes never happen again.

The site reports that “Six people at the Hartford Courant, including Content Manager Jeff Levine and Editor Naedine Hazell, have been disciplined by Tribune for their role in plagiarizing material from their competitors’ newspapers.”

Thanks to all who sent this in.

*Correction Sept. 15, 2009: The word plagiarism was misspelled as “plagiairsm” in this headline. Thanks to a commenter for spotting this typo. Update Sept. 16: As David pointed out in the comments, my corrected spelling of the word omitted the second “i.” Very sloppy. I apologize.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism, Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , | Comments

From selling nuclear secrets to stealing words

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 of computers — part I,” appears to have been lifted almost verbatim, from the computer science homepages of the University of Sussex, Imperial College London, and the University of Cambridge. A blow-by-blow comparison can be viewed in a letter to the editor of Pakistani daily The News, the same paper which carried the original column. (In the letter, the link to the University of Sussex is broken. Click here for the correct page.)

Reaction on the Pakistani blogosphere has been harsh, with one blog carrying the item under the headline “A.Q. Khan Plagiarizing Op-Ed Pieces After Lifetime Of Stealing And Selling Nuclear Secrets” in reference to the allegations of espionage that dogged Mr Khan’s tenure as head of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Thanks, Steve!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , , | Comments

Plagiarism at the Telegraph-Journal

September 1, 2009 – 10:14 am

telegraphjournalThis 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 Canadian Prime Minister (background here and here).

Now? Plagiarism. A report from CBC.ca:

The Telegraph-Journal has apologized for its third error in the last few months after a reporter plagiarized a story from New Brunswick’s French-language daily newspaper.

Irving-owned Brunswick News Inc.’s flagship newspaper apologized in its Saturday edition for a story that it says a contract reporter translated from L’Acadie Nouvelle and filed it using her byline without attributing the source.

"The Telegraph-Journal expects its journalists to operate with honesty and integrity; a bare translation without credit or attribution is plagiarism and is contrary to the Telegraph-Journal’s core ethics and principles," the apology said.

The newspaper has terminated the contract of the reporter who filed the story …

I think the CBC’s report is somewhat misleading when it calls this the paper’s "third error in the last few months." Maybe I’m nitpicking, but I’m sure the paper has made other factual errors over the summer. Any newspaper would have. So perhaps it’s more accurate to call this the paper’s third "major" error, or third scandal?

The paper’s apology doesn’t appear to be online.:

The Telegraph-Journal published an article last Thursday on the economic spinoffs of the World Acadian Congress by Cheryl Norrad, a contract writer for the newspaper.

The writer translated the story for publication under her own name without acknowledging L’Acadie Nouvelle as the source. She was dismissed from the paper following an investigation.

While news and ideas are public, the words to convey them are not. The Telegraph-Journal expects its journalists to operate with honesty and integrity; a bare translation without credit or attribution is plagiarism and is contrary to the Telegraph-Journal’s core ethics and principles.

We deeply regret that this occurred and we will be taking steps to ensure this does not happen again.

We have apologized to our colleagues at L’Acadie Nouvelle without reservation and we apologize to you, our readers.

Thanks, Trevor!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , | Comments

NY Times Mag publishes editors’ note for plagiarism similar to Dowd’s

July 20, 2009 – 1:15 pm

nytimesmagThe 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 the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam “in joyous circles” after it was freed and “nudged” the divers gently, “as if in thanks”; that the divers thought it was “the most beautiful experience they ever had”; and that one diver said he would “never be the same” appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to The Times’s writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting. In seeking to confirm the accuracy of the article, Mr. Siebert read several accounts of the episode, including one published by The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2005 on which he based his retelling.

Mr. Siebert said that he unwittingly incorporated some of the phrasing from the e-mail message that he had been sent earlier. The Times does not allow writers to replicate language without attribution, and had the editors known of these repetitions, they would not have published the passage in that form. Link

Gawker notes that the paper’s reaction to Siebert’s transgression is very different from how it handled the Maureen Dowd incident back in May. From the Gawker post:

…it’s not different—at all—from what Maureen Dowd did in May, when she "inadvertently" copied an entire paragraph written by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall into her column. Dowd’s explanation for the slip was that she was "talking to a friend of mine…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 have to assume, giving Dowd the benefit of the doubt, that she was referring to an e-mail conversation, because it’s preposterous to imagine that her friend verbally recounted a 43-word paragraph word-for-word and that Dowd took it down in her notes as such. So it was an instance of a Times reporter unintentionally lifting language from an e-mail.

When Siebert does it, he gets a 232-word editor’s-note-lashing explaining, in finite detail, how the error happened. When Dowd does it, she gets this:

Correction: May 18, 2009
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.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , | Comments

You Don’t Say: A primer on plagiarism

July 14, 2009 – 8:01 am

By John E. McIntyre

When Waldo Jaquith of The Virginia Quarterly Review discovered and published that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, had plagiarized passages from Wikipedia in his new book, Free, it provoked a lively, and sometimes alarming, discussion of plagiarism.

Regret the Error has summarized the affair, and there are extensive comments on the matter at the online edition of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

One reader’s response at VQR: “Don’t care. Don’t care. Don’t care. This is more of the same garbage from academics discovering plagiarism and making a big stink where it isn’t due. Take a fine-tooth comb to any recent publication and start googling. I bet you find a lot more than this.” Another characterized the VQR article as a “witchhunt.”

While many students and even a fair number of journalists, as well as readers who “don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” appear to think of the Internet in general, and Wikipedia in particular, as a storehouse of ready-made prose available for the taking, there are still old-school writers and editors and teachers who see this casual copying-and-pasting as theft or cheating. 

It is appalling to think that it may be necessary to restate to students and professional writers what constitutes plagiarism. But for the benefit of anyone who cut class that day, here is a short summary.

Sources: Readers are entitled to know where information comes from. Sometimes footnotes or endnotes are appropriate, and citation within the text can usually be accomplished without clumsiness. Plagiarism, which cheats the reader by failing to disclose sources, comes in two forms: misappropriation of ideas and misappropriation of exact language.

Ideas: Information that is generally known and widely available from multiple sources does not require attribution. You do not need to cite a source if you write that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. But if you write that he did so under the orders of Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war, you had better give the reader the source of your crackpot theory.

Language: If in recounting the laugh line in Our American Cousin — “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old mantrap!” — that Booth used for cover, you then write: “The laughter and burst of applause almost covered the sound of a shot in the presidential box,” you had better make sure that the second sentence is also within quotation marks and attributed to David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln. 

Chris* Anderson, in apologizing for the passages in his book lifted from Wikipedia, explained that there was a problem with the publisher in arranging for appropriate citation. But citation was not the only problem. Exact language from another source should run within quotation marks or set off in a block of type as well as being sourced by an appropriate citation.

Perhaps it’s necessary to make this even more explicit:

Do not copy text from Wikipedia or any other source without indicating to the reader where it came from.

Plagiarism can be either deliberate or inadvertent. If inadvertent, it can result from carelessness — such as mixing one’s notes from sources with one’s draft — or from failure to understand what constitutes proper sourcing.

A fellow copy editor once detected verbatim, unsourced sentences from Web sites in a reporter’s copy. When questioned, the reporter said, “Yes, I got that from those sources. It’s background.” Improbable as the explanation of innocent error was — the reporter had earned a university degree, worked at another daily newspaper, and had attended an in-house seminar on how to avoid plagiarism — the management accepted it and kept the reporter on staff.

Now we have Chris** Anderson, an established editor and published writer, caught up in an embarrassment that he has described as an innocent error, for which he has apologized, and which he has pledged to correct. That is as it should be.

But he, and his publisher, should have known better. As should you.

* ** Correction July14: Chris Anderson was incorrectly referred to as "Curt Anderson" in the penultimate paragraph of this article. Thanks to Waldo for spotting this mistake. Update July 14: A commenter correctly pointed out that Waldo noted two occurrences of "Curt" in this post. Both have now been corrected.

John McIntyre, former head of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, is the author of You Don’t Say, a blog on language, usage and miscellaneous topics.

By jmcintyre | Posted in Books, You Don't Say | Also tagged , , | Comments

Plagiarism at Cotswold Life

July 14, 2009 – 8:00 am

The Press Gazette’s Axegrinder blog spotted this apology in Cotswold Life magazine:

In our January and February 2009 issues of Cotswold Life we published a number of articles focused on upcoming events in the county which included original material taken, without permission, from the website www.soglos.com. We are very sorry that we failed to seek permission, and we are therefore pleased to take this opportunity to apologise to SoGlos.com.”

Thanks, Steve!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines, Major Errors | Also tagged | Comments

Plagiarism at the Colorado Springs Gazette

July 9, 2009 – 8:00 am

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 similar, and in some cases identical, to passages in news stories originally published by The New York Times.

For this reason, reporter Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship in our newsroom, has been dismissed from The Gazette. The Gazette forbids plagiarism, which is the act of employing the creative work of someone else and passing it off as your own. None of the four Gazette articles attributed borrowed material to the Times, as is required when quoting the work of some other publication…

The paper lists the passages taken from the Times and concludes with this:

 

Every day, tens of thousands of citizens come to The Gazette and gazette.com in good faith, expecting from us in return that we will report the news as accurately, completely and originally as possible. That good-faith relationship is the foundation of all that makes The Gazette a viable enterprise. Without trust in our journalism, there is no business. For breaching that trust, I apologize to all Gazette readers.

When it comes to the integrity of our journalism, we owe you the same amount of accountability that The Gazette demands of public institutions in the name of their constituents. We will never be perfect, but we will always strive to live up to the principles of journalism and the trust placed in us by readers.

Thanks, Romenesko!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged | Comments

Chris Anderson admits to “screwup” that led to unattributed passages in his latest book

June 26, 2009 – 8:00 am

freeThe new book from Wired editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson contains multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. The examples of plagiarism were discovered by a reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review and Anderson admits that he failed to properly attribute the text. Here’s how he explained himself:

As some of you may have seen, VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we’re doing about it…

In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL (something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson page viewed on July 8th, 2008), which struck me as clumsy and archaic. So at the 11th hour we decided to kill the notes and footnotes entirely and I integrated the attributions into the copy.

In doing so, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups:

  • Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)

  • Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)

  • In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced…

Edward Champion has weighed in and suggests that Anderson’s transgressions extend beyond what was discovered by VQR. But others, including Anderson’s publisher, have accepted his explanation.

FishbowlNY managed to track down Waldo Jaquith, the VQR reviewer, and get him to explain how he discovered the Wikipedia passages:

For Jaquith, it all started with a parenthetical. During the passage from "Free" in which Anderson describes the saying "There’s no such thing as a free lunch," Jaquith noticed that something was amiss. "It mentioned Crescent City and then, parenthetically, said New Orleans," he said. "At first, I was thrown off. I thought that maybe that before it was called New Orleans it was called Crescent City and I was mad at myself for not knowing that."

The reference needled at Jaquith so he did some research. His first stop: Wikipedia. To his surprise, the Wikipedia entry for New Orleans only mentioned Crescent City as a nickname. So he Googled the citation just as Anderson had written it in his book. That’s how he found an entry for explaining free lunch on Wikipedia.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Books | Also tagged | Comments

Plagiarism at the Toledo Free Press

June 2, 2009 – 8:00 am

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 Free Press Editor in Chief Michael S. Miller pulled the column from the Web site and indefinitely suspended Thurber pending an investigation.
Thurber responded to the suspension with the following resignation:
“My Toledo Free Press column, ‘The History of Memorial Day,’ was a compilation of various facts and information from various sources. Because of the numerous sources of the same specific facts and similar information, I did not include in the article the various attributions as I should have. For that, I apologize.
Alternatively, in order to avoid any misconceptions, I could have stated at the start of the article that the facts and information which followed were a compilation from multiple resources. I’m sorry for not making that clear.
When I sent the article to [Miller], I originally had a note in the email that the information was a compilation – just to be sure that [Miller] knew the nature of the column. I changed that note and just sent the article, as I usually do, without explanation. By not making this clear to [Miller], as the editor, I placed the Toledo Free Press into a compromising situation. For that, I also apologize.
I have the training and experience to know better and make no excuse for this error.
As I do not want my mistake to be used against [Miller] in any way, especially considering [Miller's] prior unwavering support, I would like to resign as a columnist, effective immediately.I am forever grateful for the opportunity to write for you.” …

Thanks, Steve!

*Correction June 2: The date on the Free Press article reads May 22, but this is impossible because the offending column was published on May 24. This was the paper’s error, but I should have caught it and not repeated it in my post. Thanks Doug!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , , | Comments

The Maureen Dowd plagiarism flap

May 18, 2009 – 2:15 pm

nytbanner1In her weekend column, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd included a sentence that later turned out to be taken almost verbatim from Talking Points Memo. (Compare here.) She failed to include any attribution, and this caused TPM and others to accuse her of plagiarism. Dowd emailed a response to the allegations to the Nytpicker blog and Huffington Post:

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.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers | Also tagged , | Comments

UPDATED: Plagiarism at Fortune magazine

February 26, 2009 – 9:31 pm

fortuneBarney 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 issue we published a story about Lukoil and its president titled “Russia’s King of Crude,”” the apology will read, a copy of which was obtained by The Observer. “We have since discovered that several passages were lifted from “The Triumph of the Quiet Tycoon,” written by Peter Maass and published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on Aug. 1, 2004. Fortune apologizes to Mr. Maass and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The Observer also reports that Fortune conducted a review of Gimbel’s previous work and didn’t discover any other examples of plagiarism. From the story:

When the author of the Fortune story, a young, rising star at the magazine named Barney Gimbel, was presented with the two stories and the lifted passages during an internal investigation, he offered his resignation …
When we asked a Fortune spokesperson about his departure, she said: “We do not comment on personnel issues.”
Gerry Marzorati, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, said that a few weeks ago the author of the plagiarized story, Peter Maass, contacted Fortune editors about several passages that looked nearly identical to his own. Fortune editors contacted Mr. Marzorati immediately and said they were looking into it …
“As far as I’m concerned, things were resolved amicably and fairly,” said Mr. Marzorati. “They did the right thing. They alerted us, they said they were going to do an internal investigation, and they didn’t stonewall in anyway. They acted courteously and professionally the entire process.”
The question is now what happens to Mr. Gimbel.
According to a Fortune staffer, during the investigation they found no other examples of plagiarism in his work.

UPDATE March 6: Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici reports that Gimbel’s previous work for Newsweek has also been checked for plagiarism:

Although Gimbel quickly resigned, an in-house review of his work for Fortune turned up no other instances of plagiarism. And now I’m told that Newsweek, where Gimbel worked previously, has concluded its own review of Gimbel’s articles and found nothing amiss, suggesting the lifting in his Lukoil story was a one-off.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines, Major Errors, Plagiarism | Also tagged | Comments

Plagiarism at the NY Daily News

February 12, 2009 – 8:00 am

nydailynewsAn 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 Thursday that a Web reporter, Rosemary Black, lifted, without attribution, part of a Feb. 3 Express-News story.
Plagiarism, or passing off another person’s work as though it were your own, is considered a cardinal sin of journalism.
The Express-News story, “Kissing at mall leads to fight in court,” by E-N staff writer Jeorge Zarazua, was published on Page 1.
The nydailynews.com story, published online a day later, “Kissing is no crime, say women arrested in San Antonio mall,” used, without crediting the Express-News, two quotations given only to Zarazua and two paragraphs crafted by Zarazua that led into the quotes.

After hearing from the Express-News, the Daily News updated the article to include the proper attribution. The paper also appended an editor’s note:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story should have attributed quotes by certain individuals to reporting by the San Antonio Express-News.

This is about as weak as the paper’s earlier correction for twice misidentifying a woman as the “Manhattan Madam.” The note doesn’t mention plagiarism, and it ignores the two stolen paragraphs that preceded the copied quotes.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , | Comments

2008 Plagiarism/Fabrication Round-Up

December 16, 2008 – 8:00 am

As noted in this year’s edition of the Crunks, 2008 saw an example of institutional plagiarism (the Bulletin), as well as an incident of institutional fabrication (Mainichi Daily News). Both are mentioned below, along with the rest of this year’s notable examples of plagiarism and fabrication. On the more positive side of things, this year saw John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun write a great guide to spotting a plagiarist or fabulist. It’s highly recommended. And now, on with the bad news. (Also, please email me if I missed any.)

January

The Weekly Standard apologized after it discovered that a December 2007 article by David Satter included several passages from articles published in the Eurasia Daily Monitor. Link

The Sunday Times (UK) “inadvertently” plagiarized content from Radar magazine. Link

The new sex columnist for the New York Press resigned after her first column included questions taken from Dan Savage’s syndicated sex column. Link

February

After work submitted by a contributor was found to have included plagiarized material, the Brown Daily Herald conducted a review and discovered “two [additional] articles … that contained passages similar or identical to those in other publications.” Link

An article in the Miami Herald contained passages taken from an article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Link

The New York Times published an Editors’ Note that revealed a paragraph contained in a front page article about Argentina was taken from the Miami Herald. Slate’s Jack Shafer discovered the theft. Link

The Ventura County Star fired its surfing columnist after it discovered that two of his columns contained plagiarized material. Link

Award-winning photographer Liu Wei-qiang admitted to faking a widely-published photograph that showed a herd of endangered Tibetan antelopes near a passing train on the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway. Link

Read More »

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Regret Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments

Plagiarism at Rogers Sportsnet

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 Lombardi and Andrew Brandt of NationalFootballPost.com.
Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk.com cited several examples. One of them:
Lombardi: ”Pittsburgh is really playing well right now and doing a better job of protecting Big Ben. I never thought the Steelers could win on the road with Max Starks at left tackle, but they are. Holding the Pats to one third-down conversion was just amazing. When they play on a fast track, their defense is even faster.”
Landry: ”Pittsburgh is really playing well right now and doing a better job of protecting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. The Steelers could win on the road with Max Starks at left tackle, but they are. Holding the Pats to one third-down conversion was just amazing. When they play on a fast track, their defense is even faster.”
Sportsnet is investigating, but wasn’t ready to make a statement Thursday.

Sportsnet has placed this editor’s note at the top of its coumnists page:

Portions of freelance writer Chris Landry’s columns published recently on Sportsnet.ca contained verbatim passages from columns that were previously published on nationalfootballpost.com.  Mr. Landry’s columns will no longer be published on our site.  Sportsnet.ca apologizes to our readers and to nationalfootballpost.com.

Landry’s column archive is still online here.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Online, Plagiarism | Also tagged | Comments

A paper filled with plagiarized words?

August 7, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 wholesale without attribution” in the Bulletin. The culprit is Mark Williams, the paper’s music editor and a staff writer. But it goes deeper than one writer of one article. The examples of plagiarism identified by Rosen are too numerous to list here, but here’s a sample:

Since 2005, the Bulletin has published dozens of stories under Williams’ byline that appear to be copied, whole or in part, from other periodicals. Compare the Bulletin’s Nov. 4, 2005, Franz Ferdinand piece and this NME review, published five weeks prior; the Bulletin’s Steely Dan pieceAll About Jazz (July 4, 2006); the (July 14, 2006) and this article from the Web site Bulletin’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club feature (June 14, 2007) and an earlier Boston Globe piece (May 25, 2007); the Bulletin’s McKay Brothers article (Nov. 11, 2006) and this Dallas Observer item (Oct. 19, 2006); and the Bulletin’s “God and Country: More Popular Artists Are Now Singing a Spiritual Tune” (Sept. 20, 2007) and the Billie Joe Shaver concert review by Washington Post pop critic J. Freedom du Lac (Sept. 13, 2007). The Eagles piece published in the Bulletin on Dec. 13, 2007 is a nearly word-for-word recapitulation of David Fricke’s Rolling Stone review (Nov. 1, 2007). Mark Williams sought inspiration from USA Today for his features on Paul Simon (USA Today version; Bulletin version) and Tom Petty (USA Today version; Bulletin version). The Evanston, Ill.-based blog Pop Matters is the apparent source of articles on Dwight Yoakam (Pop Matters version; Bulletin version) and Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs (Pop Matters version; Bulletin version). And then there’s “Crazy About ‘Crazy’ ” (March 2, 2007), Williams’ deconstruction of the monster 2006 pop hit by Gnarls Barkley—an article that bears a striking resemblance to “Crazy for ‘Crazy’,” published six months earlier in Slate.

And so on. Uncovering these sources is a matter of choosing the right phrases to dump into Google, not a difficult feat for anyone moderately attuned to writerly rhythms.

Rosen had a few exchanges with the Bulletin’s editor/publisher, but now no one at the paper will reply to his emails or return his calls.

UPDATE Aug. 7, 9:17 a.m.: I checked the Bulletin’s website and it no longer offers access to any content. Is this a result of Rosen’s investigation?

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , | Comments

Plagiarism at The Daily Herald; Rick Reilly robbed again

July 31, 2008 – 12:45 pm

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 Illustrated.
This deception violates The Herald’s commitment to earning and maintaining community trust. It also violates journalistic standards: It is never acceptable to take credit for work that is not our own. We must be forthright about the matters we report as well as the sources of our information.
Herald sports writer John Sleeper has acknowledged that his column, “Trust Me, Coaching Girls Is a Whole New Ballgame,” included passages borrowed from a column written by Rick Reilly for Sports Illustrated. Sleeper has been placed on suspension pending an in-depth review of the matter.
The Herald has apologized to Reilly for the unauthorized use of his work. We also apologize to our readers and promise to do everything possible to prevent this kind of failure in the future.

The offending column is online here. As of now, it includes no mention of plagiarism.

This is the second time in less than two months that a sports journalist has been busted for plagiarising from an old Rick Reilly column. In early June, Dave Pratt, a Vancouver radio personality, lost his column in the Vancouver Province after he stole from a 2000 Reilly column in Sports Illustrated. When contacted for comment, he told the CBC, “It was a Saturday and I wanted to get out of [the office] before noon.”

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , , , | Comments

Plagiarism at Web Worker Daily

June 16, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 three days earlier on MakeUseOf.com.

Giga Omni Media considers such behavior unacceptable. As soon as we were alerted to the situation, we removed the post, and we have terminated all professional relations with the contributor. We sincerely apologize to the employees of MakeUseOf.com, in particular to the original post’s author, Ellie Harrison.

We would also like to apologize to our readers. Please be assured that going forward, we will be working even harder to ensure that such breaches of both ethics and professionalism do not occur. We will also be much more selective about the contributors with whom we work.

Some of the comments on the apology point out that the Web Worker Daily post did not copy the MakeUseOf piece word for word, but that it stole the idea and included the same content. Web Worker was smart to terminate its relationship with Jason Harris, rather than let him continue to produce stolen posts.

The question, of course, is whether he did this with other posts? Also, the URL of the offending article now leads to a 404 error. WWD should point it to the apology.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Online | Also tagged | Comments

UPDATED: Vancouver Province fires columnist for plagiarism

June 5, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 editions of the newspaper.
The column, celebrating the winding down of the long career of Hockey Night In Canada play by play man Bob Cole, contained some clear similarities to the Reilly piece about legendary U.S. college basketball coach and broadcaster Al McGuire published in the Sept. 18, 2000, edition of Sports Illustrated.
The most striking was a passage in Reilly’s piece: “They say he was born 72 years ago last Thursday, but don’t believe it. McGuire dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls with a martini in one hand and a basketball in the other.”
Pratt wrote in Tuesday’s column in The Province: “Cole was born 75 years ago, but it’s more likely he dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls with a martini in one hand and a puck in the other.”
…In an interview, Pratt admitted he had taken material from the Reilly column.
“I did it, no question,” said Pratt. “It was a mistake. In our [radio] business, lines get used back and forth all the time. That particular line is a pretty famous line and I should have credited Reilly with it and I didn’t. It was a stupid mistake and something I regret and I’ll make damn sure I’ll never do it again.
“I’m looking for stuff from everywhere,” added Pratt. “We recycle everything. The sheer amount of volume we produce forces you to constantly be looking for different people’s ideas.”

Yes, I have to say it: the paper should review his previous columns to establish whether this is an isolated incident.

Thanks, Andrew!

UPDATE: When reached by phone, Pratt told the CBC that he plagiarized because “It was a Saturday and I wanted to get out of [the office] before noon.” One would assume that line will prevent him from ever working in print again. For now, it appears his radio job is safe. A spokesperson emailed the CBC to say, “We at the station are fully supporting David.”

It should also be noted that the Province story about the firing does not offer a full accounting of Pratt’s plagiarism. Andrew Bucholtz at Sporting Madness compared Pratt’s column to Reilly’s earlier story and it’s clear that Pratt stole much more than one “pretty famous line.”

“By my count, there are three paragraphs that are almost taken word-for-word from Reilly’s piece, with only the name changed from McGuire to Cole and the order of the paragraphs swapped,” Bucholtz wrote in an email to me. “The whole piece is pretty much exactly a carbon copy of Reilly’s article, just shuffled around a bit and with the names and dates altered.”

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers | Also tagged | Comments

Seattle art critic plagiarized in work for Seattle P-I and The Stranger

May 26, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 by Nate Lippens, a freelance critic, is being examined after one of his art reviews was discovered to have striking similarities to criticism published two years earlier in Art in America magazine.
The P-I is looking at dozens of pieces written by Lippens for the newspaper between July 2006 and April 2008. All links to his articles through the P-I’s Web site have been withdrawn until they have been thoroughly examined and cleared to return to the site.
David McCumber, P-I managing editor, was disturbed by the similarities.
“Obviously,” he said, “content that co-opts others’ material without credit does not meet our standards, and it’s distressing under any circumstances. It’s a sharp reminder to our editors — really, to everyone in the profession — just how vulnerable we are, and how vigilant we must be.”
The alternative weekly The Stranger also has found similarities between work by Lippens and criticism in Art Forum magazine. Lippens freelanced for The Stranger starting in 2000, and was on the staff from 2004 to 2005. The Stranger is examining all of Lippens’ pieces published in its pages and has withdrawn links to them on its Web site, editor Christopher Frizzelle announced on thestranger.com Wednesday.
In an e-mail to the P-I on Wednesday, Lippens said: “I never knowingly plagiarized material. … I’m completely mortified and ashamed for betraying the implicit trust of my colleagues, friends and readers. I know that I can’t undo it or regain that trust but I do offer my sincerest apologies to everyone involved.”

…

*Correction May 26: the first sentence of this post called Lippens a “freelance at critic” instead of a “freelance art critic.” It has been corrected. Thanks, Charlene!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers | Also tagged , | Comments

Toronto TV news station ordered to air statement admitting it breached broadcast standards

May 9, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 floor deck. He ended up breaking a leg and couldn’t complete his getaway. Charlebois called the police and then proceeded to take pictures of the man. Torontoist has the photos; Charlebois’ Flickr stream is here.

In a post on Flickr, Charlebois explains what happened next:

While waiting for the police and ambulance to arrive, I took photos of the burglar as he lay on the ground below. A newsman from Citytv also came to the scene. I refused his request for an interview. As he was poking around the property, I asked him to leave. We spoke briefly — he was nice enough; it’s the media that I find objectionable. I mentioned that I had taken pictures of the perpetrator and was looking forward to posting them on my Flickr site. He was interested in seeing them, so I provided him with a card. I left that afternoon for a weekend in Montreal. When I returned home, a friend showed me his recording of the news story which is when I discovered that Citytv had lifted my photos from my Flickr site for their broadcast.

The photos were aired on CablePulse24, a 24-hour local news station operated by CityTV. The station did not credit Charlebois as the photographer, and it did not contact him for permission prior to airing the photos. Charlebois registered a complaint with the station, writing:

The story that was broadcast on CityTV and CP24 (and presumably streamed on CP24.com, as well) included my photographs of the suspect as he lay on the ground below. The material was stolen from my Flickr site without my permission and without crediting me, for commercial use and your sole financial gain.

The station replied and said Charlebois had given verbal permission to use the photos by handing the reporter a business card and saying his photos would be on Flickr. Obviously, that doesn’t explain why the station didn’t credit Charlebois for the photos.

Unsatisfied with the reply, Charlebois filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, a “non-governmental organization created by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) to administer standards established by its members, Canada’s private broadcasters.”

A CBSC panel found that the station violated “Article 11 regarding Intellectual Property of the RTNDA -The Association of Electronic Journalists of Canada RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics.” It reads:

Plagiarism is unacceptable. Broadcast journalists will strive to honour the intellectual property of others, including video and audio materials.

It’s interesting to see plagiarism mentioned in this example. The station downloaded (copied) Charlebois’ photos and then broadcast them without offering proper credit. That certainly seems like a form of plagiarism, though Charlebois avoided the p-word and simply called the station thieves. (For another, different example of visual plagiarism, see here and here.)

In its decision, the CBSC panel addressed the issue of “fair dealing” (known as “fair use” in the U.S.). This, in the words of the panel, offers “an exception … to the restrictive demands of copyright protection” for those engaged in news reporting. But one cornerstone of fair dealing is that news organizations must respect the copyright of others by offering credit to the copyright holder. That’s the “fair” part of the equation.

As a resolution, the CBSC has ordered CablePulse24 to air this statement twice during prime time:

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has found that CablePulse 24 breached Article 11 of the Radio-Television News Directors Association – The Association of Electronic Journalists’ Code of Ethics in its broadcast of a news report of a bungled burglary on July 25, 2007. As a part of its coverage of the story, CP24 included three still photographs of the injured burglar without providing any credit to the photographer, whose identity was known to the broadcaster. By failing to provide that accreditation, the broadcaster has failed to honour the intellectual property rights of the photographer, contrary to the provisions of Article 11 of the RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics.

Note that the statement does not mention Charlebois by name, nor does it require an apology by the station. Torontoist spoke to Charlebois to get his reaction:

Charlebois is ambivalent about the decision: he told Torontoist that he’s most concerned over credit—all that he wanted—because the statement that City must read makes no mention of his name. “This announcement mentions where [City] wronged,” he told us, “but it does not set things right if they continue to withhold credit for the work.” Even if they don’t say his name, however, Charlebois does find one thing particularly rewarding: that this was the first time the CBSC has called on a panel to resolve an issue of plagiarism under the Code of Ethics, and the resulting decision sets a precedent for news organizations around the country. “These matters,” Charlebois told us, “require discussion as traditional media wrestle with the worthy opponent it is finding in alternative/online media.”

It’s remarkable that Charlebois still won’t receive credit for his photographs.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Ombudsmen, Regret Articles, Television, Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , | Comments

Wash Post’s kids poetry contest marred by plagiarism — again

May 5, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 that it was her work. Another poem on the page, titled “Eraser,” was inspired by, but not credited to, Louis Phillips, who wrote “The Eraser Poem.” Link

A winning poem from last year’s competition was also plagiarized. Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote a column about the contest.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Newspapers | Also tagged | Comments

Plagiarism at the Lancaster Sunday News

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: Not a Civil Right, Not Good for Children,” by Richard Baer, of Cornell University, should have been referenced in last Sunday’s In My Opinion. The Perspective section piece, “People Must Rule on Same-sex Unions,” supported an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution that would ban gay marriage, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Pijanowski kindly tracked down both the offending comment piece and the work it copied. Roughly a third of the News comment piece was plagiarized from Baer’s work, yet the paper declined to run a proper apology or even use the dreaded “P” word. But this was clearly a case of theft.

“Now, as a news editor at Newsday, I spent six months in the Viewpoints section, where part of my job was to weed out the freelance and submitted opinion pieces for accuracy and other issues,” Pijanowski wrote in an email. “I know how hard it was to spot plagiarism before publication, especially in the days prior to Google. But this should have been rather easy to uncover. ”

It’s not the first example I’ve seen of plagiarism in a contributed comment piece. A prolific letter writer to the Philadelphia Daily News was given the opportunity write an op-ed and he ended up plagiarizing the vast majority of his contribution. A Philadelphia city official also committed plagiarism in a comment piece, and who can forget the serial plagiarism committed by a now former White House adviser who contributed columns to his local paper.

All this to say a five minute check on Google can go a long way.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged | Comments

Plagiarism at the New York Times

March 12, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 City Hall piece about New York Lt. Gov. David Paterson, appeared at the end of a Times story about the succession process should Gov. Eliot Spitzer resign…
The Times article also reproduced a Paterson quotation from City Hall, which it did not attribute to City Hall.

Shafer’s column reproduces the letter Whitney sent to Manhattan Media and includes a response from David Blum of Manhattan Media, who isn’t fully satisfied.

“The key for me is that the Times accepted institutional responsibility for the transgression in near real time and apologized,” writes Shafer. “If only every case of plagiarism came this close to being settled this quickly.”

Update March 12: Here’s the Times Editors’ Note:

An article on Tuesday reported the reactions of political figures in Albany to the news that Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been a client of a prostitution ring. The last two paragraphs referred to remarks that Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson made at a breakfast meeting in October where he discussed his post, and it quoted him as saying he had been initially reluctant to attend a conference of lieutenant governors. The Times reporter and his editors were not clearly told by a contributing reporter that the quotation and the context had come from an article on the Web site of City Hall, one of the publications that organized the breakfast. The context should have been paraphrased and the information attributed to the site. Link

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Online, Plagiarism | Also tagged , , | Comments

Shafer finds another example of plagiarism by Times reporter

March 5, 2008 – 10:45 pm

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 not be conducting an investigation into Barrionuevo’s previous work.

Now, a week after his first column, Shafer has returned with another example of theft by Barrionuevo. Here’s what Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson said about this recent example:

It appears that Alexei did not fully understand Times policy of not using wire boilerplate and giving credit when we do make use of such material. As I mentioned to you, other papers do permit unattributed use of such material. He should not have inserted wire material into his Times coverage without attribution.

That said, because the new examples do not involve many words or an original thought, the transgression does not seem to be as serious as the first instance on paco.

Even if the paper believes the first example is worse than the second, there’s the larger concern that Barrionuevo is a repeat plagiarist. It’s surprising that Abramson is offering justification for his lapses rather than saying the paper will investigate the matter. How many examples are required before a red flag goes up? The Times should apply some reporting to this situation and discover if there are other skeletons lurking in Barrionuevo’s closet — and in the paper’s archives. Then, with that knowledge, it can take the appropriate action.

Of course, this should have been done in the first place. At this point, Barrionuevo has two strikes against him and the paper is on the defensive. It’s also a good bet that others will play the Nexis/Google game with Barrionuevo’s previous work. The clock is ticking.

Ryan Tate at Gawker also raises an important point. First, he quotes from Shafer’s first column:

Barrionuevo had been working on the paco story for a couple of weeks and realized at the end of the process that he needed definitional passages about the drug to distinguish it from crack cocaine. [Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson] says that instead of consulting his notes, which he claims contained the information, he relied on Google. Indeed, a copy of the Herald story can be found via Google.

Writes Tate:

So reporter Barrionuevo was looking for basic information about a drug at the center of his Page One story, but instead of turning to his notes, which he claimed contained the information, he just ran a Google search and copied over what he found on the Herald website. It’s bad that he essentially copied the text, but also how did he even know the information he was passing on was accurate? If he couldn’t remember the details of what was in his notes, how could he be sure the Herald information matched those details?

Also puzzling is the fact that a Times reporter with many stories under his belt seemingly “did not fully understand Times policy of not using wire boilerplate and giving credit when we do make use of such material.” Questions abound.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , | Comments

The serial plagiarist in the White House

March 4, 2008 – 8:00 am

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 only got worse. In the end, an investigation by the paper revealed Goeglein was a serial plagiarist. The paper discovered 20 instances of theft, and subsequently tacked on seven more. A full package of articles is online here. From the paper:

Contacted Sunday, the Fort Wayne native attributed the plagiarism to shortcomings in his character: “Pride. Vanity. It’s all my fault. It’s inexcusable. What I did is wrong. I categorically apologize.”
Until Friday, Goeglein was special assistant to President Bush and public liaison deputy director. Early Friday morning, Michigan blogger and former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall posted excerpts of a Thursday guest column by Goeglein and nearly identical paragraphs from a 10-year-old essay in the Dartmouth Review by Jeffrey Hart. Less than 12 hours later, after The News-Sentinel found plagiarism in 20 of 38 columns dating to 2000, Goeglein resigned.
An examination of 39 more guest columns from Goeglein published during the 1990s turned up seven that pulled material from earlier-published sources without attribution, including another from Hart.
Evidence of plagiarism appears as early as 1995. During 1998 and 1999, six of 15 guest columns written by Goeglein were plagiarized. In 1998, he was press secretary for former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats. In 1999, he was communications director for The Campaign for Working Families in Washington, D.C.
Goeglein’s guest columns were unsolicited submissions to the editorial page. He was not paid, and there were no deadlines for their completion, News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt said. Hubartt announced Friday the newspaper will no longer publish columns from Goeglein.
In multiple e-mails to The New-Sentinel on Friday, Goeglein, 44, apologized for his actions. “I am more apologetic than you know, and from my heart. Please know how deeply sorry I am,” he wrote to Editorial Page Editor Leo Morris.
On Sunday, Goeglein said, “I have no plans at this point.” His responsibilities in the president’s administration ended Friday with his resignation, he said.

Romenesko has been tracking this (1,2,3,4,5,6) and AP also has a story up. Of particular interest is a fascinating article Nall wrote for Slate. She recounts how she uncovered the plagiarism, and details how bloggers and commenters moved the story forward at a rapid pace:

Saying the news cycle moves at an ever-increasing pace doesn’t even qualify as a cliché anymore. But this felt like a new record. Reporting in one minute, writing in one hour, a whole career undone in one day. Reading the comments piling up on the original post was a surreal experience, as one reader after another checked in with evidence, with links. It was journalism as hive mind. “Everyone wants to play now,” someone wrote after posting a link.

People, including myself, often point to “Rathergate” as a case study in networked fact checking. In my book, I dedicate a chapter section to the “new checkers,” the cadre of engaged citizens who mobilize to act as external fact checkers. The Goeglein story is the latest example of this phenomenon. From Nall:

I spent much of the weekend thinking about all this. My ex-colleague Leo Morris, who edits the op-ed pages Tim used as his canvas for all those years, did as well and wrote on his blog: “This wasn’t mere hardware-pushed speed—a breaking news story for which people all around the world could see a grainy cell-phone photo five minutes after it happened. This was the online dynamic—people talking about the story and adding to it as it got bigger and more complex throughout the day.”
The story was new media, but, ironically, at its core was a very old-media concern—getting the little things right. Friday night, I got an e-mail from a fan of that notable Dartmouth professor of philosophy whose name started this whole thing. And guess what? Jeffrey Hart misspelled his name. It’s Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, not Eugene, not Hussey. When I entered the misspelled name into Google, it only turned up a couple pages of hits, and Hart’s essay was on the first page, so I spotted it right away. But if Hart had spelled the name correctly and Goeglein had pasted it as such in his own column, Hart’s decade-old Dartmouth Review essay, which mentioned the professor only in passing, would probably have been far back in the queue in the 20,000 Google hits his real name gets. And I probably would not have seen it—after all, I was just trying to find out how “notable” he was.

Remarkable. Goeglein was busted thanks to a plagiarized typo.

*Correction March 4: This post mistakenly referred to Nancy Nall as “Nancy Nail.” It has been corrected. Thanks, Kevin!

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Government, Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged | Comments