Columnist Ross Barkan Apologizes Amid Plagiarism Scandal

A creeping online scandal about the work of a prominent journalist is cascading into a professional reckoning.The writer, Ross Barkan, was accused by reporters and online sleuths of plagiarizing work and failing to credit other journalists, triggering reviews of his writing for New York magazine, Gothamist, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine and The Times’s opinion section.Again and again, he pushed back.But New York magazine investigated the claims and last week cut ties with him.

This week, his publisher suspended a forthcoming book about Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, and The Nation said it was also conducting an internal review.On Wednesday, Mr.Barkan, 36, apologized, saying he would take a break from writing amid the fallout.“I truly am sorry for the mistakes I made,” Mr.

Barkan said in a post on social media.“None of them, genuinely, were willful or intentional.

In the course of writing many columns a week, I did not use citations as aggressively as I should have and did not paraphrase well enough.”In an interview with The Times on Wednesday, he described himself as being “at the center of a firestorm.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....