Plagiarizing Head Investigative Reporter Gone from Daily Beast
It looks like Gerald Posner's "time out" from the Daily Beast is now permanent: After his editors found fresh instances of plagiarism, the lead investigative journalist offered his resignation, and it was accepted.
Posner called his plagiarism accidental when one example surfaced Friday, and his editors stood by him, but additional examples emerged this week and Posner was confronted by executive editor Edward Felsenthal. Though he's stepped aside, Posner is sticking by his story that his plagiarism from publications like the Miami Herald was inadvertent. From his resignation post:
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. In the compressed deadlines of the Beast... I... obviously lost sight of [what] belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote.
