Times Writer Has Been Copying Stories For Years
Times South America reporter Alexei Barrionuevo has been basically pasting other journalists' copy into his stories since at least 2005. Last week, the writer was caught by Slate's Jack Shafer lifting and barely rewriting two sentences from a 2006 Miami Herald article for a front page story on the drug "paco." Now Shafer has discovered a 2005 story on cattle import restrictions that borrows five sentences from a Bloomberg wire story published the day before. The Times responded with a shrug:
It appears that Alexei did not fully understand Times policy of not using wire boilerplate and giving credit when we do make use of such material. As I mentioned to you, other papers do permit unattributed use of such material. He should not have inserted wire material into his Times coverage without attribution.
That said, because the new examples do not involve many words or an original thought, the transgression does not seem to be as serious as the first instance on paco.
Barrionuevo has been a prolific writer; a search on his name turns up 230 hits on the Times website dating back three years, or one every five days or so. If the writer genuinely misunderstood Times policy and confined his copying to the spare use, amid his own reporting, of wire service copy, other examples of this sort of borrowing are sure to surface, but none much worse than what Shafer has found so far.
But there's also something just weird about the way Barrionuevo explained away his first infraction, when he copied information about paco from a Herald article:
Barrionuevo had been working on the paco story for a couple of weeks and realized at the end of the process that he needed definitional passages about the drug to distinguish it from crack cocaine. [Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson] says that instead of consulting his notes, which he claims contained the information, he relied on Google. Indeed, a copy of the Herald story can be found via Google.
So reporter Barrionuevo was looking for basic information about a drug at the center of his Page One story, but instead of turning to his notes, which he claimed contained the information, he just ran a Google search and copied over what he found on the Herald website. It's bad that he essentially copied the text, but also how did he even know the information he was passing on was accurate? If he couldn't remember the details of what was in his notes, how could he be sure the Herald information matched those details?
