At the core of The Michigan Daily’s relationship with readers is a trust that the stories in this paper are factual and original.

An article that appeared on Page 2 of the Daily on Feb. 2, 2009, “In Other Ivory Towers,” violated that fundamental trust.

Written by a senior news editor, this piece plagiarized an article from The Diamondback (Teleportation: Information? Yes. People? No., 01/30/2009), a blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education (Freshman Retention Continues to Decline, Report Says, 01/22/2009) and an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (2 Universities' Plagiarism Policies Look a Lot Alike, 01/28/2009). By nature, this feature is a compilation of news from sources across the country. While this particular piece cited these three sources, it inappropriately took complete sentences and phrases verbatim from them without using quotes. This implied the material was paraphrased when, in fact, it was not.

Though this is the only incident we found after reviewing the author’s two years of prolific writing at the Daily, the author has resigned.

We take plagiarism at the Daily very seriously. We also believe that when we violate the trust between reader and newspaper we owe you, the reader, an explanation and a corrective action. We hold other campus institutions to this high standard, and we believe we should hold ourselves to the same standard, if not a higher one.

Though this is a relatively isolated incident, in the coming weeks and months, we plan to use it as an opportunity to improve our safeguards against plagiarism and our commitment to ethical journalism. We will be providing readers with updates about these efforts, which will include more thorough plagiarism checks, mandatory training and technological safeguards. These updates will appear on our blog The Editor’s Page, which can be found at http://editorspage.blogs.michigandaily.com/.

At the end of the semester, I will provide readers with a thorough, concluding summary of our efforts in print.

This is a regrettable incident for us at the Daily. It is also an opportunity, and we plan to seize that.

Gary Graca
Editor in Chief

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Please direct your comments and concerns to me at gmgraca@umich.edu.