Abramson's Interview About Her Plagiarism

Jill Abramson, the executive editor for the New York Times who was struck by a delivery truck, in New York, April 29, 2014. Though it's usually the fatal pedestrian accidents that make headlines, the lives of those who survive being hit by a vehicle are forever changed, as the individuals can never view the city the same way ? even years after recovery. (James Estrin/The New York Times)

I mentioned in a couple of posts here in early March that Jill Abramson had written a book, Merchants of Truth, about where the news publishing business is headed, that there is valuable material in the book, and that it had become embroiled in a controversy over plagiarism.

This post follows up on the third of those points. One of the sources whence came the cribbed passages at issue is Jake Malooley, who wrote a piece years ago about Jason Mojica, a Vice News editor. The plagiarism from that piece was in fact one of the items I cited in my discussion in March.

Malooly has since had the opportunity to interview Abramson on this point. He hears her out on her apology to him, but then presses her beyond her comfort zone, in a piece run by Rolling Stone.

Here is part of the exchange.

Isn’t inadvertent plagiarism still plagiarism?No, it isn’t. I mean, you can consult your own experts. It may be that not all agree with me, but I’ve talked to a number of respected eminent scholars who have said that this is not a venal mistake. It’s a venial mistake, which is unintended. So, I don’t know, I feel like I’ve answered all of these questions. So what else do you need from me?

Which experts did you consult?I’m not gonna say. I’m not going to, you know, drag other people into this mess. No.

You say you didn’t intend to plagiarize. For those willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, one of the things that’s still unclear is exactly how it happened. Sloppiness is one thing, but a number of instances of sentences identical to another journalist’s writing appearing in your book seems to be another. How exactly did the nearly identical sentences make it into the book?I think in a few cases — there are now six, I believe — a number from the New Yorker, an article that I do credit elsewhere in the footnotes, which I think underscores the unintentionality of all of this. I have gone back and looked and, I think, again, my error was in the process of going from first draft to typed manuscript to galley. Somehow I had numbered for myself words to footnote, and somehow in these instances — I mean, they’re mostly factual things. It’s not like they jump out at me like, “Wow, this isn’t mine.” I mistook it for mine.

So you had passages of factual text pulled from various sources in a research document, and while assembling the book you were thinking, “This is something that I wrote”?I mean, I tried to be meticulous and careful, and obviously I failed in meeting that standard.

Right, but I’m trying to think through how exactly it happened. Did you have an assistant who was pulling these factual passages?No, this was not an assistant’s mistake. I did have some assistance, but these are my mistakes.

So you would find, say, my article on Vice’s Jason Mojica, grab that chunk of text, and put it into a research document. Does that track with your process?You know, I don’t know if that’s exactly right, but it’s something close. And I tried to be meticulous and careful. Some things, very few, slipped through.

I'll leave it there. The whole interview is excellent in revealing the ways in which thieves persuade themselves they were just sticky-fingered shoppers.

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