.Gerald Posner, a noted writer and journalist, resigned from the newspaper he was working for - Daily Beast - on allegations of plagiarism. He published his views on the issue in his blog where he expresses regret for the inadvertent mistakes he made. I think this is an important letter to be read by every journalist, especially in the age of the New Media.
Some excerpts:
"I realize how it is that I have inadvertently, but repeatedly, violated my own high standards. The core of my problem was in shifting from that of a book writer – with two years or more on a project – to what I describe as the “warp speed of the net.” For the Beast articles, I created master electronic files, which contained all the information I developed about a topic – that included interviews, scanned documents, published articles, and public information. I often had master files that were 15,000 words, that needed to be cut into a story of 1,000 to 1500 words.
In the compressed deadlines of the Beast, it now seems certain that those master file were a recipe for disaster for me. It allowed already published sources to get through to a number of my final and in the quick turnaround I then obviously lost sight of the fact that it belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote."
I am posting the link of the entire letter below. Read on.
http://geraldposner.blogspot.
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