In what may be a cautionary tale for journalists working in the frenetic new environment of online media, Gerald Posner, the lead investigative reporter for the Daily Beast, a year-old online news organization, resigned his post today amid allegations of plagiarism.
The resignation came less than a week after Jack Shafer of Slate.com put Posner's work under the microscope, highlighting five sentences from a Daily Beast story that were suspiciously similar to content from the Miami Herald.
In his own blog, Posner took responsibility for the infringement, though he chalked it up to "accidental plagiarism."
"I now realize that a method of compiling information that I have used successfully since 1984 on book research obviously does not work in a fail safe manner at the warp speed of the net," he wrote. "Some of the incidents raised by Jack Shafer are not plagiarism, but are instances in which I received the same exact prepared quotation or statement from a police officer or press agent as other reporters. But others are mistakes I deeply regret."
