Overview
- New York Magazine concluded an independent editorial review last week that 67 of Ross Barkan’s columns did not include proper attribution and updated those pieces before ending his column.
- Penguin Random House suspended promotion and public sales of Barkan’s forthcoming Zohran Mamdani biography and major retailers removed the book’s web pages.
- The probe began in May after Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell flagged near-identical paragraphs in a Barkan column and NPR used AI-assisted comparisons to surface more similar passages.
- Barkan issued a public apology saying the lapses were not willful, announced he will take time away to reflect, and has had other outlets review his past work while The New York Times reported no malfeasance in his freelance pieces.
- The episode highlights evolving detection tools, the severity newsrooms attach to attribution failures, and the reputational stakes tied to Barkan’s close political ties to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.