A piece in today’s Independent by former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, in which he claimed “there’s nothing you can learn in three years studying media at university that you can’t learn in just one month on a local paper” was bound to stir up some debate.
But the controversy ended up going beyond the comments he made to the publication of the article itself, when MA Magazine Journalism student from City University Harriet Thurley claimed on Twitter that she in fact originally wrote the piece in question.
And here is a link to her feature, published in the university’s alumni magazine XCity last month. The two are indeed very similar. So what happened? As far as Journalism.co.uk understands, the article was submitted by MacKenzie to the Independent’s media editor Ian Burrell, who told Journalism.co.uk today that he was aware the piece had started out as an interview but felt that that it had been “considerably” rewritten by MacKenzie in his own style.
A line has since been added to the article online to say it is “an amended version” of the interview with MacKenzie by Thurley.
We have not yet been able to reach MacKenzie for comment, but Thurley has since tweeted claiming that he was not aware of her missing accreditation.
“Gotcha!” is the expression, I think.
Quite true. I was robbed. However, I then spoke to Mr MacKenzie himself. He was not aware of my missing byline and promised to look into it. He then said: “Remember where the adventure started.” I’ll perhaps stick by the nice things I said about him now… this time.
I do appreciate the added byline from the Independent, however.
Harriet
@harriet_thurley