In special correction published today, the New York Times exposed one of its own, business reporter Zachery Kouwe as an alleged serial plagiarist.
“In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com,” the paper wrote, Kouwe “reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment.”
Times editors were made aware of the problem by Journal editors, who noticed “extensive similarities” between a Kouwe article about Bernie Madoff’s family published in the Times on Feb. 6 and a Journal article about the same subject published a day earlier. Kouwe’s reporting on the topic also appeared on a Times blog.
“In the Times article and the DealBook post, several passages are repeated almost exactly from the Journal article,” the Times editors wrote this morning. “A subsequent search by The Times found other cases of extensive overlap between passages in Mr. Kouwe’s articles and other news organizations’. (The search did not turn up any indications that the articles were inaccurate.)”
Gawker.com examined the alleged instances of plagiarism. “Kouwe’s trouble spots seem to be banal background passages, dry sentences about Madoff asset freezes that are probably as painful to write as they are to pore over in search of repetition,” Gawker reporter Maureen O’Connor wrote.
In the correction today, Times editors wrote “the matter remains under investigation” by the paper and that the Times “will take appropriate action consistent with our standards to protect the integrity of our journalism.”
Kouwe joined the Times in Oct. 2008, after working at the New York Post. The New York Observer reported on the move at the time: “We hear he’ll be writing for the paper and the web site and working on the DealBook blog, with Andrew Ross Sorkin.”
