The Scariest Word in Journalism

At Spectator, we subscribe to a number of our peer papers, including The Dartmouth, The Cornell Sun, and The Michigan Daily.
Being from Michigan, I have a special spot in my heart for the Daily, especially considering that their former editor-in-chief and current photo editor both went to my high school. But beyond that, we have respect for any group of students that put out a quality paper and they are undeniably one of the better college dailies in the country, serving a university population substantially larger than that of Spectator, and probably the best paper in the two-paper town of Ann Arbor.
All of these things together added to the shock of opening up last Wednesday's issue to find an Editor's Note publicly admitting to and apologizing for four acts of plagiarism conducted by freshman Devika Daga. (He posted another four instances on his blog yesterday.)
In his letter to the readers, Editor-in-Chief Karl Stampfl announced that he is forming a committee to look into the issue of plagiarism on the paper, noting that this is the third time that plagiarism has been found at the Daily in as many years and that past attempts to keep plagiarism out of the newsroom have clearly fallen short.
I don't know what a committee is going to find nor do I understand the motivation behind somebody plagiarizing as part of an elective club, but from my own experience, I will say that what has struck me most about plagiarism is how little it is understood by a staff. What makes plagiarism the scariest word in the dictionary to editors is that 98 percent of the time, it doesn't through any sort of willful deception on the part of the writer, but arises because they didn't understand the process of sourcing. Basically, every word in an article must be independently verified to be true and cited to a source, which is an easy concept to hear, but one that is much more difficult to fully grasp and put into practice--especially when it isn't always a crystal-clear line. Further, as the number of media outlets easily available to student journalists increases, plagiarism has become easier to do and harder to catch.
While, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ripped off an entire news article and passed it off as his or her own during my time at Spec, there have been a handful of incidents where facts, statistics, and even quotes have been found during the editing process to have been lifted without attribution from another source. To the best of my knowledge, only one person has been suspended from Spectator for a particularly egregious act of plagiarism--one that, fortunately, was caught before going to print.
While I don't know the facts, as somebody who has seen how difficult it can be to stop plagiarism, my sympathy goes out to the editors and staff of the Daily. This week must be hell for them.