Couric Producer Fired For Plagiarizing Wall Street Journal

Katie Couric really can’t catch a break. CBS News fired a producer yesterday and pulled a video piece off its Web site after an editor at the Wall Street Journal alerted the third place nightly newscast of eyebrow-raising similarities between the video and an article by the Journal‘s Jeffrey Zaslow.

CBS posted this note on its Couric & Co. blog:

Correction: The April 4 Notebook was based on a “Moving On” column by Jeffrey Zaslow that ran in The Wall Street Journal on March 15 with the headline, “Of the Places You’ll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?” Much of the material in the Notebook came from Mr. Zaslow, and we should have acknowledged that at the top of our piece. We offer our sincere apologies for the omission.

“We were horrified,” CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said. “It was almost verbatim.” Both pieces were about how libraries are seen differently by children from their parents.

CBS would not I.D. the producer in question. (If you know who it was, we will.)

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting this Thursday, February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.