An intern at the Colorado Springs Gazette has been fired for lifting passages from the New York Times and placing them in stories she wrote for the newspaper.

In an editorial posted to their website tonight, Gazette editor Jeff Thomas cited four separate occasions where Hailey Mac Arthur apparently lifted passages from past Times stories. Here's one of them:

Gazette, July 6: Few factors set homeless apart from the fortunate

Defining homelessness is politically charged these days. A word used 20 years ago to evoke compassion for the poor is increasingly accepted as shorthand for a grab bag of undesirables - the deranged, disheveled or destitute. Yet the same word applies to the largely unseen women and children who make up more than a third of the homeless in Colorado Springs.

. . . The homeless usually bear their losses in silence, their misfortune unreported and their offenders unknown.

NY Times, Dec. 5, 1999: Labeling the homeless, in compassion and contempt

Defining homelessness is politically charged in New York these days. A word used 20 years ago to evoke compassion for the poor is increasingly accepted as shorthand for a grab bag of undesirables, the deranged, disheveled or destitute. Yet the same word applies to the largely unseen women and children who make up almost two-thirds of homeless shelter residents in New York City.

According to the bio on her blog we found through Google cache (she's set her blog to private and deleted her Facebook, LinkedIn and Google profiles), Hailey Mac Arthur is a second-year student at the University of Florida College of Journalism who has also interned at the Gainesville Sun. Back in April she conducted a hilariously salacious interview with Gay Talese over the phone and wrote about it on her blog. Here are some of the highlights:

I interviewed Gay Talese in my underwear.

It was a phone interview.

He was cupping a mug of coffee in his $18-million, five-story townhouse on the Upper East Side. I was sputtering out questions and pacing the hardwood floors of my bedroom in a substantially less expensive bungalow 1,000 miles south.

He never even knew I was in my unmentionables.

Though, I'm sure his ears would perk up at the mention.

When Talese called her, he set the ground rules for the interview:

It began innocently enough.

"Hi, this is Hailey," I chirped into the receiver on the fifth ring.

No time to think. No time to review my list of questions. Certainly no time to get dressed.

"Hi. This is Gay Talese. Are you ready?"

He sharply declared a half hour was all he could spare. He'll be jetting to Germany in four days, he said, and his time for me was rationed.

But Gay Talese quickly turned the tables on young Hailey Mac Arthur and began interviewing her:

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"Have you made love?"

"Did he try to get you into bed the first night?"

The demands reverberated in my skull. This is my interview, I remember thinking. I ask the questions. Yet I felt strangely compelled to answer his.

I paused at one point. I was busy debating how I should answer his bold query. Mr. Talese inquiring if I was still on the line interrupted my internal deliberation.

"Yes, I'm here."

The intimate and intrusive string of questions had a point:

He likened the pursuing of a subject to the developing of a love affair. You can't expect to slip between the sheets the first night, just like you can't anticipate your subject opening up and revealing intimate details up front. Unless, of course, your name is Hailey Mac Arthur and you're being interrogated by a Gay Talese.

Young Hailey appeared to be sort of taken by Gay Talese's creepy, old writerly charm:

Trust is earned with time, he said. It must bloom with tender care.

Mr. Talese spends months, sometimes years, with a subject. He inspects thoughts and imitates feelings. By the time he is done, he has an insight into the subject's inner workings.

To know a subject is to fall in love with him.

Only then can the deepest thoughts be unlocked, can love be expressed in the physical form.

His prodding questions were problematic, to begin with. The reversal of roles, from reporter to subject and back again, was repelling. Our 45-minute conversation left me feeling disjointed.

Not to mention I was still in my underwear.

And of course, Talese invited young Hailey to spend some time with him whenever she made it up to New York. In the meantime, she was to write him letters:

But he did invite me out for coffee when I was next in the neighborhood, I remembered. You know, if I ever happen to be one block east of Park Avenue in the borough of Manhattan. Moreover, he suggested I type him a letter. He offered his address during our first talk.

I'll shut my laptop, when I do. I'll pour over every sentence, brood over every word. I'll address the letter like he would any piece of journalistic composition.

However, I don't have a mechanical typewriter in my possession.

Pen and paper will have to do, Mr. Talese. Thank you for the interview.

Perhaps the ultimate irony in all of this is that young Hailey Mac Arthur's writing seems to have some Maureen Dowd-ish qualities to it, no? Too bad Mac Arthur couldn't get away with concocting some sort of ridiculous "my friend told it all to me over the phone" excuse like Dowd so famously did back in May when she plagiarized TPM's Josh Marshall. If there's any justice in the world maybe the Times will give Hailey Mac Arthur her second chance. After all, everyone does deserve one.

A Breach of Trust [Colorado Springs Gazette]
pic via Hailey Mac Arthur's blog