Kouwe suspended pending decision

Jeff Bercovici of DailyFinance.com reports Tuesday that New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe has been suspended from his position amid plagiarism allegations.

A decision about his fate, Bercovici adds, could be announced Tuesday afternoon.

Bercovici writes, “That Kouwe’s actions supplied a rival with ammunition is unlikely to help him obtain clemency. And clemency has been in short supply at the Times lately: The paper recently dispatched of three freelancers who violated its ethics policy. All three said they simply hadn’t understood how the elaborate rules applied to them.

“On the other hand, there’s the example of opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, possessor of perhaps the Times‘s most famous byline. Last May, Dowd published a column featuring a passage that turned out to have been lifted from Talking Points Memo. Bizarrely, Dowd explained that she’d copied the passage not from that blog but from an email sent to her by a friend, raising the question of why a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer can’t craft her own sentences. She escaped with nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the paper’s public editor.

“One additional question in all this is whether Kouwe’s use of other writers’ language was confined to his work for the Times. A representative at the New York Post, where Kouwe worked before joining the Times, declined to comment on whether that paper is conducting its own review of his articles. But it’s worth noting that, at the Post, Kouwe was writing only for the daily edition, while at the Times he has filed far more often as a contributor to the paper’s DealBook blog.”

Read more here.