Calgary Herald
A day after being accused of plagiarism, Steve Jeffrey has resigned as editor of Anchor Weekly, Jason Van Rassel reports. “I really don’t have any way to defend myself. I did use articles for inspiration, but thought that I had changed the content enough to comply,” Jeffrey said in an email to the Herald.
Over the past two days, Jeffrey’s responses to accusations that he was a serial plagiarist have evolved. “I don’t write humor, and I don’t blog,” he told me when I spoke with him on the phone on Monday. “I write a ‘Lighthouse’ column, but ‘Lighthouse’ is about local politics.”
Tuesday, Telegram reporter Daniel MacEachern wrote that Jeffrey told him he hadn’t plagiarized. “I certainly have used other writers as inspiration, but I would say that I have not plagiarized anything,” Jeffrey said.
Humor writer George Waters uncovered the plagiarism; he found that Jeffrey had used others’ work in 42 of the last 52 issues, often just changing a few details.
