On April 9th, we ran a story turned in by an intern, and it has turned out that piece was plagiarized.
The original reporting titled Former Corvallis Business Owner Invents Prototype Mobile Shelter to Help Houseless was penned by Sam Misa at The Barometer. We extend our apologies to the folks at The Baro, Misa’s piece is good, and absolutely worth a read. Our intern lifted unattributed quotes from the story and also submitted a photo that was not their own.
Steven Sandberg of Orange Media informed our publisher of the incident the same day we ran the story. Within an hour of Sandberg’s contact, we confirmed his claim and pulled the article, and we have now also dismissed the intern. A similar incident occurred with another of our interns earlier this year.
After our review of these two incidents, we have now initiated new plagiarism checking standards, and installed a compliance officer to assure these standards are implemented on a story-by-story basis. Our onboarding procedures for new interns and staff will now include the highlight of something we had always assumed was implicit, that we expect our reporters will not plagiarize, period, full stop.
– The Corvallis Advocate Editorial Board
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