Laziness No Excuse, Seattle Editors Conclude

Late last week, I mentioned some similarities in phrasing when a column about the book industry was juxtaposed to a NYT article from a few days earlier, little knowing that the NYTBR would feature an article about buying term papers online over the weekend...or that Seattle Times columnist Stephen H. Dunphy was about to resign his post due to "careless shortcuts that in the end constituted plagiarism." An outside researcher found questionable passages in a 1997 article, and Dunphy ended up adopting the Ruth Shalit defense, according to one editor:

He said he probably used a number of wire stories and other sources--information he gathered in anticipation of writing the Sunday centerpiece story--and carelessly squished them all together when he wrote the story.

The thing is, he'd already come clean to his bosses about a similar pattern of borrowing in 2000, and they'd told him if he did it again, he was out. So they thought carefully about whether an article written before that warning was grounds for dismissal. But then an investigative reporter did a little digging, and he found some more recent incidents. In his defense, Dunphy says:

The plagiarism represented in these cases came from taking shortcuts--to get the story done, to get the information to readers. It was not intentional in the sense of some other cases of plagiarism that have surfaced recently.

But it was plagiarism, and the Seattle Times will be bringing in someone from the Poynter Institute to help the editorial staff figure out "what we might have done better" and earlier.

Now, in the column that got me thinking about these issues last week, the columnist did take care to mention the article from which she was drawing her ideas, but included a passage that was barely rewritten from the original for which the NYT reporter received no direct attribution. At the Times, it seems, that columnist might well have gotten a warning that such shortcuts do not meet an acceptable standard for journalism.