Let’s be honest about the modern digital news cycle. Aggregation keeps the lights on.
Here at Mediaweek, we spend half our lives scouring global feeds, trade publications, and platform updates to track down relevant industry news.
We read the feeds. We find the angles. We hit publish.
But there’s a massive difference between curating a solid take and copy and pasting someone else’s work.
A nasty scandal unfolding at New York Magazine proves just how thin that line gets when newsrooms demand endless output.
The prestigious publication is currently conducting a formal review of its prolific contributor, Ross Barkan. It’s an uncomfortable investigation that began after multiple prominent writers accused him of repeatedly stealing their structural copy.
The fine art of acceptable aggregation
The story gained major traction when technology reporter Bobby Allyn broke the news for NPR.
Allyn secured a blunt confirmation from New York Magazine spokesperson Lauren Starke, who stated the publisher takes these allegations seriously and is reviewing Barkan’s past columns.
The evidence looks incredibly damning.
Drew Harwell at The Washington Post discovered that Barkan lifted opening paragraphs almost wholesale from his recent piece about conservative influencer Ben Shapiro.
New York Magazine quickly updated Barkan’s article to feature proper quotation marks and explicit credit.
The plagiarism claims span multiple titles.
Compact Magazine editor Matthew Schmitz took to X to condemn Barkan for publishing heavily lifted material.
So @RossBarkan heavily plagiarized a @rojasrjuand article in Compact. He claims that this is a-ok because he linked to Juan’s article. No. That isn’t how it works.https://t.co/Z5JWqohMwt
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) May 16, 2026
Barkan also allegedly pulled partial paragraphs from The Intercept to summarise historical background context.
The hyperlink defence falls flat
Barkan refuses to quietly accept the criticism. He maintains an active presence on social media and aggressively defends his working methods.
He argues that dropping a hyperlink to the original author, such as Juan David Rojas, grants him permission to reuse paragraphs.
He claims that citing facts and dropping a link provides sufficient credit for a columnist building on existing reporting.
But journalism experts strongly disagree.
Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, provided NPR with scathing commentary.
“This kind of laziness is a real embarrassment to the publication,” Wasserman said of Barkan. “You need to always acknowledge the debt that you owe to an originating source, and when you’re taking from someone else and not making it plain to the reader, you’ve got a real problem.”
Barkan responded in an email statement, “this is all quite ridiculous.” He said inserting hyperlinks in his columns and, in the case of the Compact Magazine piece, naming the writer, was enough to acknowledge that he was borrowing another journalist’s reporting.
“I have written hundreds upon hundreds of columns, essays, and pieces of journalism in my career,” Barkan said. “I stand by my record.”
However, Wasserman stressed that a hyperlink doesn’t turn lifted text into original work.
Juan is credited directly in that column, by name, and linked to. You could actually read the actual column and not rely on an AI-curated excerpt.
— Ross Barkan (@RossBarkan) May 16, 2026
Volume and temptation
This controversy hits close to home for anyone working in digital media today.
Solid aggregation involves digesting the facts and writing original copy. Of course, citing the originating publication early in the piece and including a link as a mandatory courtesy is the way to go.
If a writer crafts a brilliant turn of phrase, identify it with some quotation marks.
The effort required to rewrite a background paragraph is minimal. The reputational damage of getting caught stealing takes a long time to repair.
But as media platforms demand higher and higher content volume in 2026, the temptation to cut corners will only grow.
Here at Mediaweek, we’ll continue to scour the web for insights, add our own distinct value, carefully cite the sources, and always write our own words.
Or at least make sure that Claude does.
Feature image- Ross Barkan: Medium.