NYT Business Reporter Resigns Over Charges Of Plagiarism

The evil pace of the Internet is apparently driving writers to plagiarize. Earlier this month Daily Beast writer Gerald Posner was suspended after it was revealed his articles contained passages that had been lifted from a Miami Herald article. Said Posner:

“Speed, the desire for a scoop, the natural inclination to want to break news on a developing story of national importance, made me shortcut my own rigorous standards.”

Yesterday, New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe resigned from the New York Times five days after a concerned letter from WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson to NYT executive editor, Bill Keller noting “apparent plagiarism” on NYT.com DealBook blog. Here’s what Kouwe told the NYO‘s John Koblin:

“I was as surprised as anyone that this was occurring,” said Mr. Kouwe, referring to the revelation that he had plagiarized. “I write essentially 7,000 words every week for the blog and for the paper and all that stuff. As soon as I saw, I guess, like six examples, I said to myself, ‘Man what an idiot. What I was thinking?’”

Mr. Kouwe says he has never fabricated a story, nor has he knowingly plagiarized. “Basically, there was a minor news story and I thought we needed to have a presence for it on the blog,” he said, referring to DealBook. “In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct. It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents.”

So, were these really just a case of a writer forgetting to follow up the copy and paste function with attribution (a.k.a., the blockquote function)? Sadly there’s no way to tell. That said, the amount of copy that passes through a bloggers hands is fairly staggering (7000 words seems like a low estimate, actually) and the ease with which it is possible to copy a passage and paste it into an article, where the only thing that stands between plagiarism and attribution is a little HTML code….well, let’s just say it’s not quite the same thing as hand copying out an entire passage word for word. That’s not to defend plagiarism, by any stretch (all the more reason to be vigilant, actually) but it does make one slightly more sympathetic to claims of unintentional plagiarism.