Washington Post, Journalism | featured news

Has technology made us all plagiarists? The Internet and Google have enabled every reporter, blogger and columnist to have what amounts to a million encyclopedias at their fingertips. We can search for material on virtually any subject and download a cornucopia of information in seconds to inform us before we begin using more traditional reporting tools.

To say that journalism has changed in the last few years is putting it mildly. Those that watch the news industry and have a concern for its future are all too the familiar with the statistics. Dramatic drops in print advertising revenue are followed by layoffs, pay cuts and even the occasional closure of an institution that have informed the public for generations. Meanwhile, an entirely new digital news ecosystem is slowly emerging on the Web and mobile platforms, even if not everybody has figured out the best way to monetize it yet. For a clue about how dramatically things...

The Washington Post suspended one of its most seasoned reporters Wednesday after editors determined that “substantial” parts of two recent news articles were taken without attribution from another newspaper.