Is your personal editorial tour de force (the “MonkeyFish” saga) still on line?

Answer: NO! Nor should it be.

You are either a hypocrite or an amnesiac. (I forget which!)

Geez…Jack

That is, the analogy between print and online publishing isn’t a clean one. Publication is continuous and by leaving the file accessible on the server, the publisher continues to publish–something they would not do in the print world.

You focus only on the archive. And it’s true that print publisher’s don’t try to expunge previously printed records of their mistakes and misdeeds. But perhaps the Wayback Machine and the various other caches–personal and institutional–are better analogues to print archives than the production servers maintained by the publisher, which, as I say, have the dual role of “printing” the current and archiving the past.

At any rate, I can’t give you the win on this one. I think if NPR tried to remove the content and pretend it never happened, you’d have a clear case. If they maintain the URL and substitute a summary of the affair, I can’t really blame them. Again, no book publisher could crank out a new printing with a prepended announcement that one of the essays was plagiarized from another author. Nor, I imagine, would the victim of the plagiarism sit still for such. But that appears to be your suggested course of action here.

Were I in NPR’s shoes, I would have done the same – had they left the article up, they would have been accused of mining plagiarized material for ad revenue, which would certainly harm their reputation more than pulling down an intern’s partially stolen work. I think NPR does understand that the mistake isn’t going to go away, given their public apology on the matter – the “Streisand Effect” is well-documented and understood by most major media outlets – so this seems to have been the optimal means of handling the issue from a PR perspective.