Unattributed Sources

Maureen Dowd, the NY Times columnist and best-selling author, has been detected recycling someone else's blog prose - without attribution.

Technically, it was only one sentence. And she did change it a little. But it was a long sentence.

[T]he whole thing is an interesting window into how her column is created. I knew someone once who was on her call rotation. Every week, she’d call and collect amusing lines from him, which she’d invariably use without attribution. Every writer does this to some extent — I’ve made a lot of money over the years stealing from my conversations with Matt Labash — but she seems to do it more than most.

Producing scheduled columns is tough.
When you're out of ideas, you can go for fluff.

Or borrow something and change it enough
so no one knows it's not your stuff.