21-Year Veteran Journalist Fired After Plagiarizing Wikipedia Articles

[mandy]

Wikipedia article on the investigation of the journalist's plagiarism:

Sleuthing Wikipedia editors have found several cases of apparent plagiarism over the past two years by Tim Ryan, a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. It began with the discovery of an article last month containing language that closely matched a Wikipedia article, and more investigation found earlier articles that seemed to borrow from additional sources without attribution.

In response to these reports, the Star-Bulletin acknowledged the situation by adding corrections or editor's notes to some of the articles. Star-Bulletin Editor Frank Bridgewater took these actions after investigating the incident and also met with the newspaper's publisher, Dennis Francis, about the situation. However, Bridgewater said last week that he considered the issue of whether any action would be taken against Ryan "a confidential personnel matter."

full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:W..._Wikipedia

Notice from newspaper Honolulu Star-Bulletin to its readers regarding journalist's dismissal:

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has dismissed entertainment reporter Tim Ryan following an investigation into stories he wrote during the past several years.

The stories contained phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, un-attributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin. The stories did not include inaccurate information or any fabrications.

Ryan, who had been at the Star-Bulletin since 1984...

full article: http://starbulletin.com/2006/01/13/news/story03.html

[Nat]

Tisk, tisk, tisk. He's old enough to know better.

For years we had one local freebie paper that comes out 3 times a week.  They've been the only freebie paper here for many, many, many years.  Then one day a new paper was created locally and put out once a week.  People started noticing that the same article, word for word was appear in both appears but many assumed it was the newbie paper plagerizing the older paper. 

But that wasn't it, it was the older paper copying from the newbie paper and to prove it the newbie paper made up a completly false story and wouldn't you know it - that very same article appeared in the other paper, word for word.  The newbie paper the following week posted an article about this happening and also posted a full retraction about the article about it's being false and apologized to the people named in it (but those people were in on the "sting").  I guess some reporters just start to get lazy and don't want to work for their own stories.  Tisk, tisk, tisk.