BuzzFeed has fired senior reporter Ryan Broderick after news emerged late Friday evening that a number of his stories for the website had been plagiarized or incorrectly attributed from other sources.
The disclosure was made late Friday evening by the website’s new editor-in-chief Mark Schoofs, who identified 11 articles by Broderick which had been updated and amended with editor’s notes.
“It is BuzzFeed News’ policy that nothing may be copied, pasted, and passed off as one’s own work, and that all quotes should be attributed. We regret that in these instances those standards were not met,” Schoofs wrote. “BuzzFeed News apologizes for these lapses, both to you, the reader, and to the authors of the original work and their news outlets.”
Plagiarism scandals are nothing new for the cat- and listicle-focused website. In 2012, BuzzFeed senior editor Matt Stopera was accused by the website Gawker of “copying and pasting chunks of text into lists without attribution.”
Four years later, one of the site’s most famous viral editors, Benny Johnson, was also ousted after an internal review found dozens of instances of plagiarism across his published posts.
“Benny is a friend, colleague, and, at his best, a creative force, but we had no choice other than letting him go,” BuzzFeed’s then editor-in-chief Ben Smith said at the time.
