Intern Fired For Lifting From NYT
This is just….stupid.
Announcement: Do not plagiarize if you want to keep your job. In the age of Google, you’re stupid to think you won’t be caught. Chris Anderson was caught in like three seconds.
So now Hailey Mac Arthur, a summer intern at the Colorado Springs Gazette, has gotten caught publishing “passages that are substantially similar, and in some cases identical, to passages in news stories originally published by The New York Times.”
You can see the comparable passages here, or read Gawker’s take here.
This girl, she made a really stupid mistake but if she’s already on Gawker she’s getting enough crap, so we’re not going to hassle her online. But we do want to say this: In college, professors seem to labor under the delusion that people plagiarize because they’re afraid of failure. If you’re under pressure and you don’t think you can do a good enough job by yourself, and you don’t think you’ll get caught, that’s when the plagiarism happens.
That’s a fairly charitable interpretation but even if that’s what happened here, it seems like Mac Arthur has totally missed the point of journalism.
