USA Today Cuts Ties With Crossword Editor After Plagiarism Scandal
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Version 0 of 1. A crossword puzzle editor who was investigated over accusations of plagiarism will no longer have his work appear in USA Today, the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett, and a crossword puzzle vendor, Universal Uclick, said on Tuesday. The website FiveThirtyEight reported in March that more than 60 crossword puzzles by the editor, Timothy Parker, copied elements from puzzles in The New York Times. Other similarities were found between puzzles from USA Today or Universal Crossword, which is syndicated by Universal Uclick, and those in The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. Susan Johnson, a spokeswoman for Universal Uclick, would not comment on Tuesday night, beyond a statement dated April 18 on the company’s website. The company said then that Mr. Parker would not return as editor of the USA Today crossword puzzle and his work would not appear in Gannett or USA Today Network publications. In the statement, Universal Uclick said it began an internal investigation after the reports of plagiarism appeared and its findings “confirmed some of the allegations.” The company said Mr. Parker would take a three-month leave of absence as editor of the Universal Crossword puzzle. Efforts to reach Mr. Parker on Tuesday night were unsuccessful. In a statement on Tuesday, Gannett said that Mr. Parker was never an employee of USA Today and that no future puzzles in Gannett publications would be edited by him. “USA Today continues to take this matter very seriously,” the statement said. “We conducted our own investigation and we are satisfied with how Universal Uclick has responded to the situation.” In its report in March, FiveThirtyEight said the duplicate puzzles were revealed through a database created by Saul Pwanson, a software engineer from Seattle. “The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues” from New York Times puzzles published years earlier, the FiveThirtyEight report said. The report also suggested that Mr. Parker helped reuse material he had already edited: “Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. Most of those have been republished under fake author names.” FiveThirtyEight reported on Tuesday that USA Today had severed its ties with Mr. Parker. |