Sedalia newspaper reporter fired on plagiarism charges

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A sports writer and movie reviewer for The Sedalia Democrat has been fired for plagiarism, the newspaper's editor said Sunday.

Michael Kinney, 29, was fired after an investigation into his work, prompted by a reader who called the paper last month to report a familiar-looking movie review in the Democrat.

Editor Oliver Wiest, in a special column published Sunday, said he fired Kinney June 5.

Kinney was hired as a sports writer in December 2001 and also began writing movie reviews for the daily newspaper last year.

On May 3, a reader called the newsroom to say that his son had noticed similarities between a movie review by Kinney and one written by Roger Ebert, syndicated film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.

In the interim, Wiest said, he searched the Internet and "found several similar instances of plagiarism from online sources in Mr. Kinney's movie reviews dating back to late last year."

Wiest said he also asked Kinney "what I would find when I examined his sports columns. He replied nothing. 'That's all mine.' Sadly, it was not." Wiest said he found "more extensive plagiarism" in two of Kinney's sports columns.

Most of the material lifted by Kinney was descriptive phrases, sentences and "occasionally a paragraph," Wiest wrote. Nothing in Kinney's coverage of local or state sports was questionable, he said.

Kinney returned a call from The Associated Press seeking comment Sunday afternoon but cut the interview short when visitors arrived at his Sedalia apartment.

He said he had worked previously at a newspaper in Washington state, and he described his recent experience in Sedalia as "a little tough."

Wiest noted in his column that Kinney was well liked by his colleagues -- an observation echoed Sunday by Bill Schey, a sports copy editor at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.

Schey said Kinney had been working in a bookstore when he answered an advertisement for a part-time job answering phones in the newspaper's sports department.

Besides answering phones, Kinney also covered some high school events for the paper before leaving in 1998 or 1999 to become sports editor of a weekly paper in a nearby town, Schey said. He recalled that Kinney spent nearly two years at the weekly and was occasionally hired by The News Tribune to cover specific high school events.

"He always seemed to do a very solid job on them," Schey said. "He was a tremendously nice kid, one the easiest guys to work with I've ever met. He was extremely well liked by co-workers, and by coaches."

Wiest said Kinney had told him that "he had lifted character descriptions in Roger Ebert's nationally syndicated column from a Web site when he was running up against his copy deadline. He said he did it to save time and acknowledged that as 'a stupid mistake.' He led me to believe that it was an isolated incident."

In addition, Wiest said, Kinney told him he had "not realized the extent to which he had used others' words and presented it as his own work."

Before investigating Kinney's record thoroughly, Wiest said, he had expected to suspend Kinney for one week without pay and require him to get formal training in journalism ethics. But he concluded at the end of the investigation that Kinney had to be fired.

The newspaper will now adopt -- and publish -- a code of ethics, Wiest said, as well as a column "explaining the ethical standards by which we expect our readers to hold us accountable."

"We have let our readers down by publishing without attribution material taken from other writers under Michael Kinney's byline," Wiest wrote. "I apologize to our readers for that."

In a telephone interview from his home Sunday, Wiest -- who hired Kinney -- said he recalled that Kinney had attended a private Missouri college for four years and had taken a journalism course but had not been a journalism major.