Romenesko spotted a strange case of "self-plagiarism" yesterday: a reporter for the Explorer, weekly paper in Arizona, was fired after he/she was found to have taken a story written for a journalism class and, with a few minor updates, passed it off as new work. Aside from the dishonesty, one of the problems was that the piece was outdated and therefore contained inaccurate information. From the paper:
The EXPLORER newsroom has been coming to grips with this over the past several days after discovering that a staffer engaged in an act that can best be described as self-plagiarism.
The story that appeared in last week’s paper about pet accommodations at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort was a recycled work.
The employee, who is no longer employed here, originally wrote it for a college journalism class and presented it as new material.
While the story received marginal updating, the staffer retained quotes from the original piece. The concierge quoted in the story no longer works at the resort. The story accurately reflected that another source for the original story is now working in a different department at the resort.
Later in the article:
What happened to us, and to you, last week was a breach of trust on several levels — first in the relationship between a writer and the editors, then in the relationship between this newspaper and the readers who invite us into their homes every week.
And in the news business, trust isn’t just earned once. Every week, we put our credibility on the line.
We’ve reviewed the editing process, and there really was nothing that would have told us that there was a factual problem with this story — no quotes that seemed “too good,” nothing seeming out of place.
So where do we go from here?
We will review other stories this person has written for us, and if further correcfions are needed, we will publish them.
We have also talked with the news staff this week and explained that this kind of performance is intolerable.
We apologize. We got it wrong in a big way by the standards of a community newspaper, and we are sorry. We can and will do better.
As we've previously explained, it's important that the paper name the offending reporter.
