Portions of Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker blog posts taken from his previous writings

by Steve Myers Published June 19, 2012 1:33 pm Updated June 20, 2012 8:28 am

JimRomenesko.com | New York magazine
The New Yorker has added an editor’s note to a recent Jonah Lehrer blog post in which he more or less copied the first several paragraphs from something he wrote for The Wall Street Journal in October. NewYorker.com Editor Nicholas Thompson tells Jim Romenesko, who revealed the problem, that he wasn’t aware of the duplication. New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli has found two more examples in which Lehrer’s recent blog posts contain sentences quite similar to things he’s has written in the past.

We have made it easy to comment on posts, however we require civility and encourage full names to that end (first initial, last name is OK). Please read our guidelines here before commenting.

Anonymous

exactly what is the “problem”? lehrer used a short piece of something he had written before. so what? you can’t plagiarize yourself. if you can, then i know a publisher who, in his weekly column, has plagiarized himself, oh, 30+ times in the last 30 years. this criticism is ludicrous.
Anonymous

Yikes. Schaudenfraude aside, I feel for the guy. As a journalist, you can go from struggling to be heard to having so many demands for your copy that you run out of things to say. And how many of us want to admit when that happens? Hamster-wheel production schedules can make for bad judgments.