After a month-long suspension from writing because of plagiarism, Linda and Richard Eyre’s column for the Deseret News was re-instated this week.
The first column on the Deseret News website from the Eyres since August 29 was published Oct. 8. The column is titled: “Linda & Richard Eyre: What matters is in ‘your house'”
As iMediaEthics wrote at the time of their suspension, one of Richard Eyre’s columns, published July 31, plagiarized from the New York Times. (Separately, PsyBlog ended up unpublishing blogpost because of its similarities to the same New York Times article.) Eyre apologized and explained what went wrong in an e-mail to iMediaEthics. After that discovery, the Deseret News investigated the Eyres’ work, found five more columns with problems, and suspended them for a month.
Richard Eyre has said the couple writes for the Deseret News for free. Their website states that they are speakers on “topics of parenting, life-balance, and family-strengthening.”
iMediaEthics has reached out to Richard Eyre asking what he and Linda Eyre will do to make sure they don’t have any more attribution problems in their work. We’ll update with any response.
Earlier this week, the Deseret News found 40 cases of sloppy attribution in writing from summer intern Michael Smith. The investigation and review were prompted by iMediaEthics’ inquiries over attribution in Smith’s work. Some content was lifted verbatim without credit or quotes to the original source and other content was lightly rewritten.
Smith apologized in an e-mail to iMediaEthics and said that he didn’t know proper aggregation standards.
UPDATE: 10/14/2013 8:26 PM EST: Added information about the Eyres’ work.