Accusations of plagiarism surfaced again on Wednesday as Gawker leveled multiple charges against Jared B. Keller, the news director for the media start up Mic.com.
In a post entitled “Plagiarist of the Day,” Gawker writer J.K. Trotter listed 20 examples of Keller having allegedly lifted text, in some cases whole paragraphs, from other sources.
In three cases, Keller was said to have copied material word-for-word without any link or citation to its source. In the remaining cases, Keller allegedly lifted text from articles that he hyperlinked to elsewhere in the article, but the text was unaccompanied by quotation marks or direct citation.
TPM emailed Keller for comment on Wednesday afternoon. He responded: “No comment.”
Jake Horowitz, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Mic.com, did not immediately respond to TPM’s request for comment on Wednesday.
James Allen, the company’s vice president of communications and strategy, gave a statement to TPM on Wednesday afternoon.
“Plagiarism is unacceptable,” Allen said. “We have strict editorial standards and conduct ethics trainings for new employees. Using detection software, our copy editing team also checks articles for plagiarism prior to publication. Mic takes any allegations of plagiarism seriously and will conduct an internal review to determine the appropriate next steps.”
One example Trotter cited began with a July 9 story in the Belfast Telegraph:
The Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), released a video on July 9 which they say shows the launch of rockets from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel. The video shows a vehicle-mounted rocket launcher firing a number of rockets, though it is not possible to establish the date nor location of capture. The vehicle’s door is emblazoned with the Al-Quds Brigade’s distinctive logo. Militants in Gaza have reportedly fired hundreds of rockets at Israel in recent days, leading Israel to launch a military operation dubbed Operation Protective Edge. Israel has struck hundreds of targets in Gaza in response to the rocket launches.
The next day, Keller wrote the following paragraph on Mic.com:
The Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), released a video Wednesday that purports to show the launch of rockets from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel. The video shows a vehicle-mounted rocket launcher firing a number of rockets, though it is not possible to establish the date nor location of capture. The vehicle’s door is emblazoned with the Al-Quds Brigade’s distinctive logo.
In another example, Trotter wrote that Keller can be seen “copying or very lightly rewriting passages (mostly from AP or Reuters wire stories) that are credited in the same post,” with a hyperlink located somewhere in the post.
For example, here is a passage from an article on Vox.com, originally published on Jan. 26:
The awful truth of the anti-vaccine movement is that it puts the most vulnerable populations at risk: infants under 12 months of age, who can’t get vaccinated and are more susceptible to infection, and the elderly, who have a higher risk of death if they contract these illnesses.
Here is what Trotter said Keller wrote in a post on Jan. 28:
The sad truth of the anti-vaccine movement is that it puts the most vulnerable populations at risk, including children under the age of 12 who simply can’t get vaccinated…
When TPM checked the post on Wednesday afternoon, the passage appeared to be different. No note accompanied the post explaining whether it had been changed or updated. It read:
The sad truth of the anti-vaccine movement is that it puts the most vulnerable populations at risk, including young children who simply can’t get vaccinated.
By Wednesday evening, the post had been updated with this correction:
An earlier version of this article stated that children under the age of 12 cannot be vaccinated. This article has been updated to note that only children under the age of 12 months cannot be vaccinated.
Keller is an alumnus of The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and Al Jazeera America. Trotter noted that the Atlantic featured among the list of sources Keller was accused of plagiarizing.
This post has been updated.
Call me hopelessly out of it, but I didn’t know mic.com was a thing.
Aww … that’s too bad. He’s cute. Cute people shouldn’t do things like that.
Here we go again. Are these folks lazy, stupid, or a little bit of both? Have these people never paid attention in class? Or do they just want to get credit with a minimal amount of work? Why am i asking questions that have obvious answers?
What I’m wondering is the looseness of meaning applied to the term “editor.” At minimum, it is a responsible person, the protector of the language, and a friend to the readership and the writer. This dude appears to meet none of these criteria.
totally agree with eggrollian’s post. as a former reporter who has seen countless friends and colleagues lose their jobs over the past few years, this hurts. there are lots of talented journalists looking for jobs who actually report instead of copying and pasting other people’s (often poorly written) work.