… is perhaps the most common variety of plagiaristic experience – see Jonah Lehrer and Johan Hari for a couple of high-profile recent cases. And at only 25, Phil Jacob, of Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, is another perfect case in point. Stealing quotations and pretending you got them in an interview with the subject, copying and pasting large chunks of text from other sources, tweaking other sources (updating; providing specific local content) to make the content look like your own – they’re all there, all the patented techniques. And, of course, as is true of almost every high-profile case of plagiarism UD has covered on this blog, there are multiple examples of it in Jacob’s work. Plagiarists tend toward the prolific.
Jacob has resigned.