The author of the popular The Agonist, a Weblog devoted to war news and writing, got caught with his hands in someone else's cookie jars - Sean-Paul Kelley has admitted lifting a good deal of his material word-for-word from a news service produced by a Texas commercial intelligence company.
"You got me. I admit it," he told Wired. "...I made a mistake. It was stupid."
He might have thought of that before his blog became so popular that it earned him profiles and interviews with the like of The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and National Public Radio. Not to mention, Wired said, his changing his story several times in a series of interviews with the magazine, going from using "just four or five" items a day from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas intelligence outfit, to "six or seven days when half was from Stratfor."
Kelley - whom Wired says had only three weeks' actual journalism experience, at a local newspaper - was first suspected a plagiarist by another blogger who calls himself General Roy. This blogger, on his own Strategic Armchair Command site, accused Kelley outright of plagiarizing Stratfor material in just one day, though General Roy denied to Wired that he was out to get Kelley.
Roy told the magazine he has no tolerance for plagiarism. "Let the blogosphere decide," he said.
