Update: The New York Observer's John Koblin spoke to Kouwe, who resigned on Tuesday.
"I was as surprised as anyone that this was occurring," Kouwe said. "I write essentially 7,000 words every week for the blog and for the paper and all that stuff. As soon as I saw, I guess, like six examples, I said to myself, 'Man what an idiot. What I was thinking?'"
"I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there," he added. "I think that's what probably happened."
Still, he acknowledged the seriousness of his mistakes and did not excuse himself.
"There's no excuse for this," he said. "I understand the seriousness of it. Even if it was inadvertent, that doesn't make it any less serious."
Update: The New York Observer's media reporter John Koblin tweets that Kouwe has resigned:
sources tell me that zachery kouwe resigned late this afternoon. story coming shortly...
Original Post: The New York Times has suspended business reporter Zachery Kouwe while it investigates charges of plagiarism.
Kouwe was the subject of an odd correction in Monday's newspaper, in which the Times said Kouwe "reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment" and that it had found "other cases of extensive overlap between passages in Mr. Kouwe's articles and other news organizations'."
Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovici reports that Kouwe is "suspended pending the verdict from his bosses, expected to be delivered at a meeting on Tuesday afternoon."
Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson tipped the Times off to the issue in a letter to Executive Editor Bill Keller:
"I'm writing to alert you to a case of apparent plagiarism in the New York Times.... The extensive use of such similar phrases, without attribution, is extraordinary. This is not a case of a columnist with apparently perfect recall or cryptomnesia, but one of fundamental journalistic integrity."