Times Reporter Caught Plagiarizing Blames Self, WordPress

Zachery Kouwe

The Times business reporter who resigned yesterday after the Wall Street Journal accused him of lifting copy from their articles has come clean about the situation. 31-year-old Zachery Kouwe tells the Observer that when his editors told him about the allegations, he "was in complete shock. Then I started worrying and started thinking, how the fuck did this happen?" Apparently, it happened because Kouwe, in his rush to crank out content, forgot that some of the information he was piecing together was other people's writing, not his own:

I was as surprised as anyone that this was occurring. I write essentially 7,000 words every week for the blog and for the paper and all that stuff. As soon as I saw, I guess, like six examples, I said to myself, "Man what an idiot. What I was thinking?"
In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct. It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents. I’ll go back and rewrite everything... I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there.

And now his career in media is probably over, unless he wants to wants to go into blogging, where his rapid fire copy/paste skills will actually give him an edge! (This one only took 8 minutes in Movable Type!) Alternatively, people always need disgraced Times reporters to coach their lives.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By John Del Signore in News on February 17, 2010 10:50 AM

Comments [rss]

Stephenson Billings

As an Investigative Journalist myself, I can understand the pressure he must feel to meet deadlines but as a Christian I cannot condone theft, particularly in the unscrupulous field of international money reporting.

Son of Spam

I know! It's uncanny.

billybob

He looks stoned in that photo

ides_of_march

Considering much of the Times material is thinly veiled DNC press releases, this isn't a such a big deal.

Jen S

This guy looks SO much like my little brother (mole included).

Dougal

Umm, what the heck does this have to do with WordPress? Yeah, I see he mentioned it as the CMS, but only in passing.

The article title seems misleading, to me.

airtech1

Wait, the NYT is still in business? What's the NYT?

FelixtheCat & Christine Quinn'

+1

Aveais Essex

-1 boiled kitten

Aveais Essex

Hilarious and original.

10/10

thewildpansy

How the fuck is that hilarious? What a sick sad human you are.

bobj

" As soon as I saw, I guess, like six examples, I said to myself, "Man what an idiot. What I was thinking?"

This guy writes for the Times? He writes a high school girl

dagblad

It took 8 minutes?

beardofbees

Including a coffee break.

John Del Signore

That right, a break for "coffee."

wobbleSmith

well, there's no time to proofread yesterday's news.

Splicer

Let's wake up a little bit here and talk about intent. His editors put pressure on writers to crank out content on deadline and are probably nasty about it as well. I'm not saying that he did nothing wrong but was it an error or a malicious attempt to pass off another person's work as his own. Suspend him if you must without pay for a week if that makes the NY Times feel better but for a person to lose their career because an error is stupid. Like I always say, with all the brainpower working overtime, sometimes the Space Shuttle blows up. Mistakes happen. Planes crash.

Was the WSJ threatening legal action if they didn't ask for this person's resignation? My gut feeling is that is probably the case. I must ask though, why is the right-leaning WSJ so litigious? I thought conservatives hated lawyers. Oh, wait a minute, they like them when they are their lawyers. Got it.

Anonymous Lost Cause

Funny how the perpetual screw-ups of the world and the people who love to defend them always want to talk about intent rather than about whatever actually happened. Any professional journalist ought to know that the working method this guy claimed to be using -- cutting in pasting in blocks of text with the intent to attribute sources during the process of re-writing them -- is all but guaranteed to result in errors. Many errors. If he didn't know that, the only good reasons for him not knowing that are (a) an utterly defective intellect or (b) a wildly-out-of-touch sense of confidence in his ability to never make errors while using an inherently flawed method of working or (c) both. You seem to be a friend of his and you think it does him a favor to tell people "hey, back off, he is too stupid to see the problems with his working habits but his heart was in the right place"? It's not a matter of "a person to los[ing] their career because an error"; it's a matter of a person losing their career because they appear to be fundamentally unsuited to it. If you can't see that you might want to take your rose-colored intent-seeing glasses off. Particularly when there are hundreds of unemployed journalists in this city who are capable of seeing and understanding what went wrong here and not ending up in the same situation themselves. Comparing it to a plane crash or whatnot is just a ridiculous effort to change the subject from the essential question of whether this guy is good at what he does or not. It's pretty obvious he isn't. I don't work in journalism myself but to see someone defending what is at best mediocrity (and at worst complete ineptitude) on the basis that "hey, it's not a plane crash" really repulses me.