behind the news

Breaking! CJR Has the Next Issue of the Montgomery County Bulletin

Featuring plenty of classic articles "by" Mark Williams
August 7, 2008

Thanks to Jody Rosen’s piece (“Dude, You Stole My Article”) in Slate yesterday, the Montgomery County Bulletin is getting a lot of attention today. (And not the good kind.) Seems that one Mark Williams, a writer at the alt-weekly, has, since 2005, been plagiarizing from publications like Slate, Salon, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and many more–“plagiarizing,” via taking other writers’ words and tweaking them ever so slightly, usually by adding unnecessary words or punctuation–and doing so with an audacity that would make even Barack Obama shake his head in astonishment.

Well. CJR managed to get our hands on the next issue of that paper in advance of its publication—and we figured that, given the high value the Bulletin’s staff places on transparency, they wouldn’t mind if we published some of that issue for you now. Because, after all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that theft of intellectual property is the sincerest form of flattery.

To see the advance copy, click here.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.