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Courtesy of Buzzfeed. Plagiarism and Buzzfeed's Achilles' heel

In 2013, the satirical website The Onion wrote an article titled "BuzzFeed Writer Resigns In Disgrace After Plagiarizing ‘10 Llamas Who Wish They Were Models.’" It appealed to reporters because it was a clever knock on the state of digital journalism — and because it resonated with a widely held perception about BuzzFeed.

High-profile plagiarism cases are always met with a certain amount of schadenfreude from the media's chattering classes, as well as calls for the defendant's head, but the response to BuzzFeed editor Benny Johnson's serial plagiarism has been especially intense.

There's a reason for that: In the eyes of many journalists, BuzzFeed is constantly walking a fine line between aggregation, or "curation," and theft. Go to BuzzFeed.com and click on any one of its lists. In very fine print, buried below each photo, there will be a link to another site — usually Reddit — which is where the photograph came from.

Is this plagiarism? Of course not. Does it feel a little seedy? Yeah, a bit.

In 2012, as BuzzFeed was growing into the Internet sensation it is today, Slate's Farhad Manjoo (now with The New York Times) wrote a lengthy post explaining "the secret to BuzzFeed’s monster online success."

"How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret?" he wrote. "The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell, deliberately—their posts are hard to trace back to the original source material."

Because BuzzFeed is so popular, Manjoo wrote, its "pilfered" lists all but eclipse the original sources of content: "Once you understand how central Reddit is to BuzzFeed, it’s like spotting the wizard behind the curtain. Whenever you see a popular BuzzFeed post, search Reddit, and all will be revealed."

Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed's founder, told Manjoo that there was "nothing wrong" with picking up other people's content "because few things on the Web are really original."

Gawker's Adrian Chen (now with The New Inquiry) also wrote an extensive analysis of BuzzFeed's "plagiarism problem" in 2012.

"BuzzFeed has built a lucrative business on organizing the internet's confusing spectacle into listicles easily comprehended by even the most numbed office workers," Chen wrote. "But the site's approach to all content as building blocks for viral lists puts it in an awkward position in relation to internet etiquette and journalistic ethics."

"For example," Chen wrote, "the BuzzFeed listicle '21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity,' appears to be an almost exact replica of a couple of posts on an obscure site called Nedhardy ... BuzzFeed slapped together many of the same pictures, presented it as an original idea, and it went Avian-Flu-level-viral, ending up with more than seven million page views."

Is this plagiarism? It's certainly closer to it. Somehow, the Internet came to accept it: The New York Times reported, Huffington Post aggregated, BuzzFeed curated. Maybe "repackaging funny things found on Reddit is just how the internet works these days," Chen wrote.

Text, of course, was a different story. You couldn't publish someone else's articles or Wikipedia entries and just throw a link to the original source at the bottom. When BuzzFeed reporters wrote, they were subject to the same rules as everyone else. Sure you could draw facts from elsewhere — everyone does — but you had to write it in your own language.

At some point, Johnson probably got lazy and started inserting text into his posts the same way he had been inserting photographs — by pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. His mistake was that he forgot to put quote marks around it and add "according to."

It didn't help reporters' perception of BuzzFeed that, when the first instances of plagiarism were brought to editor-in-chief Ben Smith's attention, he called them "serious failures" of attribution, rather than "plagiarism," and simply "corrected" the posts.

"Ben, you can’t 'correct' articles that were clearly plagiarized. I know you know this!" Gawker's J.K. Trotter wrote on Twitter.

BuzzFeed is currently conducting an internal review of Johnson's work before deciding on how to proceed. Whatever Johnson's fate, his plagiarism is one more instance in which the public spotted the wizard behind BuzzFeed's curtain. And the wizard seems a little seedy.

Meanwhile, The Onion's satire has become reality.

"Journalism today," one Bloomberg News journalist tweeted: "accused of plagiarism 'for an article it did about former President George H. W. Bush's socks'."

Update (July 26)

Late Friday evening Smith announced Johnson had been fired after an internal review found 40 instances of plagiarism.