Gard L. Michalsen

Plagiarism scandal hit norwegian business paper. Stealing from US media, including NY Times, New Yorker, Time, Bloomberg and CBS

Scandal has hit Dagens Næringsliv, Norway’s largest business newspaper.

Publisert 29.07.2015 - 00:50 Sist oppdatert 29.07.2015 - 00:50

Denne artikkelen er over to år gammel.

UPDATE 30th of July: The plagiarism and copycat-journalism now also includes stealing from CBS and Bloomberg. At least ten articles is now proofed to be result of plagiarism. Read more in this story (norwegian).

A scandal has hit the well reputated Norwegian business daily Dagens Næringsliv (www.dn.no).

DN is owned by NHST Media, the same group that owns MyNewsdesk, Upstream, Tradewinds, Recharge, Intrafish, and more.

Saturday the newspaper published a story about personell receiving complaints from customers.

The story was well written and most interesting. However many of the quotes in the story was stolen from a story in the New Yorker five years ago.

The plagiarism was discovered by a Norwegian member of Twitter, Øistein Refseth, who Sunday published a tweet about his findings.

Later on the scandal has dominated norwegian newspapers this week.

The editor in charge of Dagens Næringsliv (DN), Amund Djuve, immediately initiated further investigations. This has uncovered that the journalist Daniel Butenschøn through the latest years has written many stories with false quotes and information.

These have been stolen from The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, Time, Traveller.com and other publications, but presented as if they were given directly to the journalist. DN has also stolen descriptions and situations from other newspapers, not just quotes and interviews.

- This has been done over time and systematically, which makes it very serious, editor Djuve says, according to DN tuesday.

And Djuve continues:

- In many ways, it is impossible to understand why he did it. These are articles with many «real» and interesting sources, but then he has also added quotes and phrases which is stolen from other media.

The journalist Butenschøn quit his job in Dagens Næringsliv earlier this summer, before the scandal hit.

He has also been a deputy member of the board for SKUP (The Norwegian Association for Investigative Journalism), but has now decided to withdraw from this position.

When Butenschøn quit his job this summer, he was intented for a job as an editor/advisor in the Tinius Trust, working with journalism, quality and integrity projects. The trust is the largest owner of Schibsted Media Group, one of Europes largest media groups. When the scandal hit this week, Butenschøn tuesday announced he was no longer applicable for the job.