On the evening of Wednesday, July 25, 2018, we discovered via Tasbeeh Herwees’ Twitter thread that a piece in our August/September 2018 print issue titled “Shoplifters of the World” plagiarized quotes and reporting from Herwees’ feature titled “We R Cute Shoplifters,” published in Good magazine in June 2016. The piece was pitched to us by a freelancer and we accepted it. In our fact-checking process, we failed to discover the plagiarism, which we are very embarrassed about. If we had known the piece included plagiarism, we would never have published it.
In our 25 years of existence, we’ve never published plagiarism before. Today, our print editors put in place new steps in our fact-checking process, so we can do our best to make sure that we never do again. This begins immediately, with our October/November 2018 issue. In the future, we will also do a closer vetting of the freelancers who pitch us.
This morning, our editor-in-chief reached out to Tasbeeh to apologize personally and to offer to pay her our full writers’ fee. We apologize to Tasbeeh publicly now here, as well as to BUST readers. We will also print an apology in our forthcoming October/November 2018 issue. To Tasbeeh and our readers: we messed this up, and we’re so sorry. We’re doing our best to make things right and to to make sure this never happens again.
