BuzzFeed has updated and attached corrections to three articles by Benny Johnson that swiped passages from other sources, J.K. Trotter reports in Gawker. The notes (1, 2, 3) were added Thursday afternoon.
Two Twitter users with the names @blippoblappo and @crushingbort outlined examples of Johnson lifting text, in one case from a press release from U.S. Rep. Sam Johnson.
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith told Trotter BuzzFeed was “grateful to @blippoblappo and @crushingbort” for alerting it to the lifted text and said Johnson, the publication’s viral politics editor, “is one of the web’s deeply original writers, as is clear from his body of work.”
Smith told Poynter that BuzzFeed plans to keep Johnson on.
Comments