Four stories on Wired.com were plagiarized

Wired redesign RetractionWatch.com reports that four stories that have appeared on Wired.com since the beginning of year contained plagiarized material.

Ivan Oransky of RetractionWatch reports, “It was the start of an episode that would lead to the dismissal of a WIRED reporter, and the addition of warning notes to four of the publication’s stories.

“When Rogers got to the WIRED office, he printed out the stories, and some other material Larson had sent. Going through them with a highlighter, he saw enough of concern that he went to the magazine’s research editor, Joanna Pearlstein, who also took a look.

“They found a lot of problems in the four stories that Nic Cavell, a reporting fellow who had started at WIRED in January for a six-month stint, had published online. WIRED has four such fellows at a time, and the program, which pays participants, has been a big success, Rogers said.

“Cavell — whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a Crime Reporter at the Riverdale Press, and a fact-checker for Smithsonian Magazine; his website says he graduated from Brown University in 2014 — hadn’t published anything in print yet, although he had a greenlight for one story. (We’ve tried to contact Cavell, but have not heard back.)”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.