The Times business reporter who resigned yesterday after the Wall Street Journal accused him of lifting copy from their articles has come clean about the situation. 31-year-old Zachery Kouwe tells the Observer that when his editors told him about the allegations, he "was in complete shock. Then I started worrying and started thinking, how the fuck did this happen?" Apparently, it happened because Kouwe, in his rush to crank out content, forgot that some of the information he was piecing together was other people's writing, not his own:
I was as surprised as anyone that this was occurring. I write essentially 7,000 words every week for the blog and for the paper and all that stuff. As soon as I saw, I guess, like six examples, I said to myself, "Man what an idiot. What I was thinking?"
In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct. It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents. I’ll go back and rewrite everything... I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there.
And now his career in media is probably over, unless he wants to wants to go into blogging, where his rapid fire copy/paste skills will actually give him an edge! (This one only took 8 minutes in Movable Type!) Alternatively, people always need disgraced Times reporters to coach their lives.
