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Washington Post Trips Over Effort To Introduce Blog By Outsider

  • C|Net, Monday, March 27, 2006 11:18 AM

With more and more big-time newspapers introducing Web logs as an enticement to readers and advertisers, it's a wonder there haven't been more brouhahas over the content in those online journals. The Washington Post experienced the risk of the blogosphere firsthand last week when washingtonpost.com, which operates independently from the print paper, discovered that its newest hire had had some problems with plagiarism in the past. The Post's online unit had recently brought on 24-year-old Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide, to write the Red America blog. Says C|Net, "The Redstate.com blogger, who had recently referred to Coretta Scott King as 'a communist,' quickly became the target of allegations he plagiarized material under his byline in various prior publications, according to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz and a sea of other bloggers who cited all sorts of examples." Domenech acknowledged the charge, but said it goes back to work he did when he was just 17 years old. Meanwhile, he has resigned. Several months ago The Washington Post had a somewhat similar problem with its online site when it recognized "objectionable content" had been posted as comments on one of its blogs.

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