Gerald Posner — the Daily Beast investigative reporter who last week admitted to plagiarism after Slate’s Jack Shafer uncovered several instances in Posner’s work – has resigned from Tina Brown’s site.
Posner announced the resignation on his blog:
This afternoon I received a call from Edward Felsenthal, the excellent managing editor of The Daily Beast. He informed me that as part of the Beast’s internal investigation, they had uncovered more instances in earlier articles of mine in which there the same problems of apparent plagiarism as the ones originally brought to life last Friday by Shafer. I instantly offered my resignation and Edward accepted.
What was clear was that the excellent reputation established by The Daily Beast in the last year should not be tarnished by any controversy swirling around me.
While resigning, Posner was defiant, maintaining that the plagiarism was “inadvertent” and was a product of shifting from a career as a book writer to the “warp speed” of the Internet, where he was writing an average of, ahem, two articles a week.
Since June 1, when I accepted the full time staff position, I have published 72 articles (8 were published freelance before accepting the full-time reporter’s job). That averages about 2 articles a week. They all required intensive reporting, and the subjects ranged from the Michael Jackson death probe, CIA morale, Teddy Kennedy’s fortune, whether there was a John Doe 2 in the Murrah bombing, exclusive interviews with Afghanistan’s Karzai brothers, Roman Polanski, probes into domestic and international terror, and the Tiger Woods story, among many others. At least a dozen stories that I spent time researching did not pan out, and never got published.
I realize how it is that I have inadvertently, but repeatedly, violated my own high standards. The core of my problem was in shifting from that of a book writer – with two years or more on a project – to what I describe as the “warp speed of the net.” For the Beast articles, I created master electronic files, which contained all the information I developed about a topic – that included interviews, scanned documents, published articles, and public information. I often had master files that were 15,000 words, that needed to be cut into a story of 1,000 to 1500 words.
Read Posner’s entire resignation note here, and Shafer’s original reporting on Posner here and here.
[Photo via Slate]
