After Publishing Largely Plagiarized Story, Bust Magazine Offers Extensive Mea Culpa
LatestIt would be perfect if it weren’t so unfortunate: a writer with sticky fingers published a story about shoplifting—and got caught stealing. A piece about the Tumblr community of (mostly) young girls who shoplift and tell (“Liftblrs”) by a young writer named Rosie Albrecht that appears in the August/September issue of Bust called “Shoplifters of the World” bears striking resemblance to Tasbeeh Herwees’s popular 2016 Good story, “We R Cute Shoplifters.” The Bust story uses similar historical framing examining the through line from how women thieves were regarded in the early 20th century versus now. It cites much of the same research of the Good piece (often down to the word), quotes many of the same Tumblrs, and makes many of the same points with slight rewording.
For example, Herwees wrote:
These were respectable women, and to label them criminals would undo a social order the elite establishment held precious to its survival. So they were labeled “sick” instead.
In her piece, Albrecht rendered the same idea like this:
Labelling respectable women as criminals would have threatened the entire social order of elite society, and so female shoplifters were declared kleptomaniacs: women who stole because they were ill, and could therefore be cured.
Most egregiously, the published version of Albrecht’s text contained unattributed quotes that Herwees had collected directly from sources via her original reporting. One was from researcher Britney Summit-Gil and another was from one of the anonymous members of the Liftblr community, PrincessKlepto, whose trust Herwees spent weeks gaining in order to report the first-hand perspective on her illegal activity.
“I was legitimately shocked,” Herwees told Jezebel by phone Thursday. She was notified of the copying via text by a friend, who was perusing the new issue of Bust at a bookstore. Soon after on Wednesday, Herwees tweeted about the apparent plagiarism:
How did Bust, which has operated for 25 years without a similar incident, according to its editor-in-chief Debbie Stoller, publish such a piece?
“We were pitched a story by a freelancer, we went over it at the story meeting, it sounded like a good story,” Stoller said by phone Thursday. “We assigned it to her. We have a super tight budget, so we end up working with a lot of writers who are just starting in their careers.”
Stoller said that while Bust articles are fact-checked, “we have a staff of six here that handles everything.” For a glossy, Bust’s staff is and always has been skeletal. So fact-checking hasn’t been as extensive as it is at other publications, which often require the writer to turn in transcripts and/or recordings of interviews that were conducted in the reporting of the piece.
“We never actually searched quotes in stories to make sure they were coming from the writer and not from some other story,” Stoller admitted. “We’re going to do that from now on.”