Plagiarism row over Telegraph blog blunder

Posted by Martin Stabe on 29 August 2006 at 09:29
Tags: Blogs, Daily Telegraph, Journalism

Bloggers this weekend accused the Telegraph of plagiarism after a blog post written by a Chicago writer appeared under the byline of the paper’s New York-based correspondent Melissa Whitworth.

The post, written by blogger Claire Zulkey, was published last week on the US media news site MediaBistro. It later reappeared, verbatim save a new head and Whitworth’s byline, on Telegraph.co.uk’s Society blog. Zulkey was not impressed.

By Sunday, the Telegraph had removed the post and published an apology from Whitworth, in which he explained that she had e-mailed the post to her editor at the Telegraph because she thought he would find it funny, but that “somewhere along the line it was mistaken for my latest posting and published”.

Some of the bloggers who had accused the Telegraph of pilfering the post accepted the explanation and apologised.

Others, however, were less forgiving. One commenter on the Telegraph site responded that Whitworth’s mea culpa was “the lamest and most off-handed excuse I have ever seen and I feel insulted that you and the paper expect people to swallow it. I’ve seen better crafted excuses from a five-year old.”

The post that launched this row is certainly worth reading. It links to some writing advice by Copyblogger entitled “Five signs that your blog post is going horribly wrong“.

Tags: Blogs, Daily Telegraph, Journalism