Plagiarism According to the Victims

Jill Abramson made mistakes in a book with 834 citations. She doesn’t call herself a plagiarist but has promised to fix her mistakes.

We could listen all day to Vice employees airing their grievances on behalf of the people getting plagiarized… but what do the authors of said plagiarism think?

Ian Frisch was not out to get Jill Abramson when his tweets went viral. Ian explained to me he had just seen Moynihan’s tweets, and quickly decided to check a book preview. He saw that Jill had rephrased some of his work and used quotes from an interview he conducted back in 2014.

Ian’s tweets, alleged that Jill had plagiarized him at least seven times in her new book. His thread also mentioned that she lifted the reporting from his personal website which had been offline for a year — or so he thought.

After an hour his tweets going viral, someone tweeted Jill had properly cited him in the end-notes. Ian, to his credit, immediately responded then appended a response to the thread but let readers know he still thought Jill’s citations were still inadequate.

What about Ian’s personal website getting plundered? It was a perfect storm of confusion. Years ago, Ian uploaded a “flattened” PDFs to Issuu, so writers of his magazine could pull clippings. He intentionally scrubbed them of SEO properties and text selections so that they wouldn’t be found by search engines. I explained to Ian how I found his PDFs through basic search terms, he seemed genuinely confused having made a deliberate effort not to be found and I speculated that maybe they were indexed without his knowledge. Sure enough, I found a blog post on Issuu stating that it had updated its search and text recognition system in 2013, a year after Ian began uploading PDFs.

Ian hopes the book is amended but told me has not been contacted by Jill or member of her team.

Mathew Ingram, writing for Columbia Journalism Review, was also plagiarized and the irony was lost on no one. Jill, in a book about journalism ethics had used material from a journalism watchdog. Yikes. Matthew, put his thoughts into another article for CJR ‘I was plagiarized by Jill Abramson’. In an email to me, Mathew reiterated what he had posted: “I don’t feel like something important was stolen but I do believe it was plagiarism, and I don’t think it’s something one would expect from someone of Abramson’s caliber.”

Jake Malloy was one of two of the most egregious examples of plagiarism in Jill’s Book. In an on-record interview published in Rolling Stone Jill apologized for using his material. Jake appreciated the apology but made it clear how upset he was that Jill insisted that she lifted “facts” not “original ideas” because it minimized the work that he and other journalists put into getting those facts.

Ryan Bigge’s Master’s thesis is referenced twice but only cited once, and he seemed pretty nonchalant about it.

Jesse Brown interviewed several people from the early days of Vice for a media criticism podcast. Short quotes from the guests were lifted without credit. Jill had credited something else from the site Canadaland but didn’t cite the podcast as the source of the quotes. When I told him Abramson agreed to make the changes he seemed content at first but upon further consideration would also like an apology.

UPDATE Feb 20 2019: Jill phoned Jesse to apologize. He accepted her apology.

A Vice employee said Jill “cribbed” Penelope Green but the passage in questions cites her plainly and clearly. Asked if she felt cribbed: “Good heavens, not at all!”

Nicolle Weeks told the Ryerson Review of Journalism that she was “pretty perplexed” to see her work in Jill’s book. “If you’re a well-known journalist and you’re plagiarizing — you should probably be out of the job.”

Shane Smith describing his family as “dirt poor” came from a Joe Rogan podcast which lacked a citation. It is a mystery what Joe thinks about this.

Daniel Voshart (me) Subtle similarities in structure as well as the use of an obscure tweet that only I had previously written about which I don’t consider plagiarism.