Mau­reen Dowd is in hot water at The NYT today. It seems that she may (or may not, depend­ing on your POV) have lifted one of her quips directly from the thoughts of another blog­ger, Talk­ing Points Memo edi­tor, John Mar­shall. A huge brou-ha-ha has ensued, and the out­come has yet to be deter­mined. I am inter­ested, not only as a observer, but also as some­one who has had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence with The Gray Lady, a moniker to which the paper is tra­di­tion­ally referred. But hon­estly, I’ll let you decide for your­selves if my renewed dis­gruntle­ment is justified.

On Sep­tem­ber 27, 2007, I wrote about the death of jew­elry designer, Kazuko Oshima. After my post went up, I was con­tacted by Mar­galit Fox, obit writer for The New York Times, inquir­ing as to where I obtained my infor­ma­tion regard­ing Ms. Oshima’s pass­ing, and would I please help her get in con­tact with the friends/relatives who so informed me. I for­warded on the nec­es­sary email address and also let the recip­i­ent know that The NYT was look­ing to do an obituary.

The result of my assis­tance resulted in an Octo­ber 4, 2007 notice by Ms. Fox that included the fol­low­ing description:

In Ms. Oshima’s most char­ac­ter­is­tic designs, crys­tals and semi­precious stones are wrapped in webs of gold wire and seem to float above the body as they encir­cle a wrist or neck. Ms. Oshima believed pas­sion­ately that the mate­ri­als that she worked with pos­sessed great heal­ing pow­ers, some­thing she often dis­cussed in interviews.

I described Kazuko’s aes­thetic in my men­tion of Sep­tem­ber 27, 2007 this way:

Her sculp­tural pieces—gemstones wrapped in com­plex webs of gold wire—had a gos­samer qual­ity that made it appear as if the gems were float­ing around the body rather than weigh­ing it down. Kazuko believe that every min­eral had an aura or purpose–a heal­ing power of sorts.

When I later wrote to Ms. Fox stat­ing my offense at what I per­ceived as her appro­pri­a­tion of a por­tion my post with­out proper credit, she responded that under the pres­sure of her dead­line, she may have used a few too many words that were sim­i­lar to mine. She did not admit to bor­row­ing my orig­i­nal expres­sion in its entirety.

Now I’m sure you are ask­ing why I’m expos­ing this now. Writ­ing a story for The NYT Sun­day Busi­ness sec­tion was one of the high­lights of my career thus far. How­ever in my expe­ri­ences there­after, and there were a cou­ple, the stan­dards that applied to me were not upheld by the NYT’s staff with which I was deal­ing; I was left dis­il­lu­sioned with the paper. What I recount above was one of those expe­ri­ences. I would cer­tainly wel­come the oppor­tu­nity to write for the paper again, pro­vided I was dealt with fairly. But the NYT’s edi­tors and staff need to come down from those clouds upon which they believe they deserve to be perched. That’s for the birds.