The Facts

Ross Barkan is a high-profile contract writer for New York Magazine. He has a forthcoming book about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He is now under formal review by his own publication after getting caught copying other journalists' work.

Barkan's opening paragraphs were lifted nearly wholesale from other sources — according to NPR, which broke the story on May 17, 2026.

How It Started

Barkan published a piece on conservative influencer Ben Shapiro. Days earlier, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell had published his own Shapiro piece. Barkan's opening paragraphs closely tracked Harwell's work.

When social media caught it, New York Magazine quietly updated Barkan's article to directly quote Harwell. No correction notice. No editor's note explaining what happened. Just a silent fix.

It Didn't Stop There

NPR then found at least two more instances of the same pattern.

Barkan pulled partial paragraphs from stories published by The Intercept and Compact Magazine. NPR documented passages with the same 30 words in a row. In other cases, near-identical language with one word slightly swapped out.

Matthew Schmitz, the editor of Compact Magazine, went public on X calling Barkan's article "heavily plagiarized" and demanding New York Magazine address it directly.

New York Magazine spokesperson Lauren Starke confirmed to NPR: "We are conducting a review of the writer's prior work."

Barkan's Defense

Barkan didn't deny copying the passages. Instead, he argued on X that he included hyperlinks to the original pieces, or mentioned the original authors by name in his text.

"I am allowed, as a columnist building on his reporting, to cite facts. Especially when he's credited," Barkan wrote, referring to reporter Juan David Rojas, whose work Barkan copied across multiple instances in a single piece.

A hyperlink is not a substitute for quotation marks.

Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR: "This kind of laziness is a real embarrassment to the publication. You need to always acknowledge the debt that you owe to an originating source."

The Unexamined Questions

Barkan is working on a book about a sitting mayor. If his journalism practices are this sloppy across published articles, what does that say about the sourcing and original reporting in that book manuscript?

The initial response from New York Magazine was to silently patch Barkan's Shapiro article without transparency. That raises questions about the editorial process. Who edited this work? Did no one at the magazine notice 30 consecutive borrowed words?

Barkan's defense — that a hyperlink equals attribution — would allow any writer to copy any sentence as long as they drop a link nearby. The stolen passages came from publications across the political spectrum: The Intercept (left), Washington Post (center-left), and Compact Magazine (right-leaning). This wasn't ideologically motivated. It appears to be a consistent working method.

The Larger Problem

Plagiarism in journalism is theft. The reporters at The Intercept, The Washington Post, and Compact Magazine did the original work. They made the calls, conducted the research, and crafted the language. Barkan took that labor and published it under his own byline.

New York Magazine is a prestigious publication. How the magazine resolves this review — whether it conducts a thorough investigation or minimizes the findings — will indicate whether its editorial standards have any real weight.

Barkan built a public profile on being a sharp, independent voice. Some of that voice belonged to other people.