The Washington Post has dismissed reporter Marwa Eltagouri over what it reported was a failure to properly attribute aggregated content to an original source in her own reported work. Eltagouri had been with the paper less than a year and her employment was terminated during a nine month probationary window.
A rep for the Washington Post declined to comment to TheWrap as well as the paper’s own in-house media guru Paul Farhi. By 4:00 p.m. eastern Eltagouri was already listed as a former general assignment reporter by the paper’s website.
Farhi specifically pointed out that Eltagouri’s dismissal was not a result of plagiarism, but more technical matters surrounding attribution protocol. A number of her articles for the website now carry an editor’s note:
Editor’s note: The Post has learned that this article contained several passages that were largely duplicated, some without attribution, from a story published by [name of news organization]. Post policy forbids the unattributed use of material from other sources.
Before joining the Post, Eltagouri spent more than three years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and before that worked as an intern for the Hartford Courant, according to her LinkedIn profile.