We Made an Error on Patch

I plagiarized a story in March by accident and I am sorry for the mistake. Let me explain what happened.

Early that month, I received an email from a friend who works in the St. Louis media industry. The email contained several paragraphs about Maplewood's making and selling its own jams, sauces, etc.

The author of the article was not included. I assumed it was generated from Home Wine Kitchen, and was something akin to what we'd post in our announcements or Local Voices sections. So I went to the restaurant, took my own photo of some of the products, then put it all on Patch as an article. I credited the story to Home Wine Kitchen at the bottom.

The text in the email was actually copied from Feast Magazine's website. Using copy from another source, unattributed, is plagiarism, and is wrong.

I removed the article from Patch and called Feast managing editor Brandi Wills to apologize. She accepted my apology graciously.