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Nicholson resident Argit Marishta receives Outstanding Graduate of the Year award at Keystone College

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Our Opinion: Could ‘highway in the sky’ shuttle people between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton?

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<div><b>By George Spohr</b> - gspohr@www.timesleader.com</div>
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A couple of weeks ago, I told you that we no longer employed a reporter who plagiarized from online sources. I promised to keep you updated on an investigation into her entire body of work.

What we’ve found is discouraging.

Our investigation uncovered at least five instances over the past three months in which she copied text from online sources without attribution. In three of those instances, she took text from multiple sources within the same story.

It appears that she took text from local sources – such as the ScrantonMade blog, West Pittston Library’s website and the F.M. Kirby Center’s website – and such national sites as Style.com.

Editors found that:

• “From books to beer,” published Feb. 16, included entire unattributed paragraphs taken from the West Pittston Library’s website.

• “Lady sings the blues – and more,” published Feb. 20, includes unattributed text taken from the Kirby Center’s website.

• “Help is just a click away,” published Feb. 22, included unattributed text taken from ScrantonMade and Camera For A Cure’s websites.

• “Go North to check out some fashion trends,” also published Feb. 22, included unattributed text taken from Style.com.

• “A lesson in friendship,” published March 6, included two quotes taken without attribution from Applause, the Frank Erwin Center’s blog. It also contained multiple sentences taken verbatim from the Greater Morgantown Convention and Visitors Bureau’s website in West Virginia.

While I wish I could promise these types of errors will never again appear on our pages, the fact is a reporter who is intent upon deceiving their editors and our readers can get away with it – albeit briefly.

Even at The New York Times, widely considered the best newspaper in the country if not the world, journalist Jayson Blair was able to get his fabrication and plagiarism through layers of editing far in excess of our own.

That said, our editors are brainstorming ways to limit bad journalism from appearing again. We’re also taking steps to ensure we are completely transparent with our readers; this column is one step in that process.

As for additional steps, editors are in the process of removing bad information from our former reporter’s articles. In some cases, it’s as simple as attributing information to the original source – a simple step our reporter should have taken but inexplicably did not.

Additionally, we continue to review her body of work beyond her most recent clips.

While I take no joy in writing this column, I was encouraged by the response we received when we brought this issue to light initially. One local journalism professor told me she planned on using this as a teachable moment for her students. Other readers called to thank us for our frankness and honesty about something that we’d much rather sweep under the rug.

As always, if you have any concerns about our reporting, I encourage you to reach out to me.

George Spohr is executive editor of the Times Leader. He can be reached at gspohr@www.timesleader.com.

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George Spohr: Reporter plagiarized from multiple online sources