Deborah and Gregory, I disagree. I actually think it's the opposite.

I think you have younger people running the Web site, which rightly or wrongly aggregated news from other sources, and you have older, less Web-savvy editors assuming that, if it's on The Courant Web site it must belong to The Courant, cutting and pasting into the print edition.

Neither group owns all the blame. It was probably a lack of communication by an understaffed and underfunded newsroom.

Sadly, this is probably due to cutting senior journalists in favor of keeping or hiring (cheaper) youngsters who have not been taught journalistic ethics, but simply do what they've been accustomed to doing throughout school and college - go online to cut and paste together reports and term papers written by someone else's sweat and scholarship. Or, buying a pre-written report and attaching their own name to it. Editorial staff cuts have also cleared out all of the support staff who once fact-checked and researched to help senior writers. Blatant plagiarism is happening more than anyone realizes. You certainly see it all across the web thanks to aggregator software and "faux" news sites lifting entire articles from legitimate writers and replacing the original authors' names. Defending copyrights is becoming a full-time job. This is why many newspapers will be forced to return to a "paid access" format. How else can they shelter their content from thievery?

The NYT is no stranger to embarrassing plagiarism incidents involving persons who did not grow up in the Internet age, but good point about newspapers loosening their standards. So what do you think about the NYT deciding NOT to publish any of the hundreds of emails that prove much of the "science" behind global warming is contrived? Their argument - they don't publish private emails. Of course, that policy hasn't stopped them from publishing any number of confidential defense documents, the Pentagon Papers, etc. Citizen journalism is starting to rise above traditional journalism only because they publish everything and don't try to be the gatekeepers who let you see only what they want you to see.

I think we have newspaper editors who have grown up in the Internet age, or who are at least taking their cues from online media where it's common (but just as careless) to cull their news from other websites and not do the basic research. Newspapers should rely on their editorial process to keep them a step above citizen journalism, where content is often published without any editorial oversight. Instead, newspapers continue to cut their staffs, and loose their cred in the process.

It really sounds here like someone was trying to get something for nothing. If this is true it sounds like they'll lose their reputation.