By: E&P Staff Kate Parry, the Reader's Representative at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, wrote a column yesterday addressing a recent incident where a writer at the newspaper reproduced sections of a New Yorker article by Hendrik Hertzberg word-for-word in an editorial.
Editorial Page Editor Karen Albright would not identify the writer of the piece to Parry, and would not tell her whether the writer was disciplined. Albright told Parry that everyone involved had agreed that the copied phrases had been taken "unintentionally."
Parry called unintentional plagiarism "a specter that haunts even meticulous writers."
"In the midst of a complex project, will I go back to my aging notes and accidentally pick up a phrase that should have been attributed to another writer?" she writes. "In other newspaper plagiarism cases, that has been the enduring explanation: It was a mistake, I misread my notes, I was rushing and I'll never do it again. Sometimes that's precisely what happened. But if there's any flair to the writing, it strains credulity to think a writer wouldn't recall someone else wrote it. So much has not been disclosed about this case I can't guess at this particular writer's mind-set."
To read the full column,
click here.
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Related E&P story:
'Star-Tribune' Reveals Editorial Lifted From 'The New Yorker'
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