This is a follow up to my article The Media Miracle.

Immediately after posting that article, I was contacted by Patrick Smith, who asked if his article influenced my article. What happened next was very interesting, so I'm going to tell the story in some detail.

As soon as Patrick sent that e-mail, I immediately looked at his article, and I thought... Wow, there's a lot of similarity here. But I hadn't read his article before I wrote mine, so how could that be? And then I remembered.

On the morning of August 18, 2010, I sleepily grabbed my iPad and browsed through two periodicals: USAToday and Slate, using their respective iPad apps. One of the featured articles in Slate was indeed Patrick's article. With horror, I thought "Holy cow, I've stolen his article."

And then I remembered what happened to George Harrison. There's a detailed account of the story here on Wikipedia, but the short of it is this: his 1970 song My Sweet Lord is a copy of the Chiffon's 1962 He's So Fine. The courts awarded damages to Ronnie Mack, the writer of He's So Fine, and the plagiarism was attributed to cryptonesia, wherein a memory presents itself as an original idea. If you listen to the video embedded above, you can see how very similar the two songs are, and why a compelling argument can be made that Harrison plagiarized.

But did he do so consciously? We can't ever know, but I think it's quite possible that he didn't, because a similar thing happened to me before. I used to run a website called Odd New England. It was a travel directory of unusual places to visit throughout the six northeastern states. While I was working on the Vermont section, I noticed a number of strange things relating to animals. For example, on Interstate 89, two giant whale tails rise out of a hill near the highway. As you near the waterfront, the buildings are festooned with life-size flying monkeys. And a few blocks from there, a rhino is bursting through the wall of a lamp shop. Given that these sites were in proximity and nice path could be drawn between them, I created a "strange animal" tour that people could follow.

Except that I didn't. Joe Citro did.

I read a lot of books to compile information for my site, and one of the best was Joe Citro's "Curious New England." In fact it's the best book for this type of thing. About a month after I wrote about "my" tour, I was dismayed to discover that nearly the same tour was in his book. My tour included more sites, but the concept of an animal tour was clearly in his book. I had certainly read that section, but when the idea for the tour occurred to me for my site, it seemed as though it was my own. This was a humbling and disappointing moment for me. After all, if I can't trust myself, who can I trust? I absolutely did not "plagiarize" Joe's work by sitting down with his book and copying his material and calling it my own. But I DID get the idea from him, forget its source, and then later re-attribute it to myself. It's very disconcerting that this type of thing can happen, but it does.

Can I prove that this was the course of events? No, not at all. In fact, it's only because this happened to me that I give credence to the idea that George Harrison may have developed the melody and chord progressions of My Sweet Lord thinking they were a completely original work. Had I not experienced this phenomenon myself, I'd be much more doubtful.

Now back to my article about "miracles." Did the same thing happen again? At first, I was convinced it had. I immediately wrote Patrick and apologized for not at least mentioning his article, and then I promised him I'd write this one explaining what happened. And after several day's of thought, I realize that I did not subconsciously copy his work and call it my own, though his article did influence me.

Here's what happened: When I read his article that sleepy morning, I didn't actually read it. I had literally just woken up, and I only skimmed through the first couple of paragraphs to get the main point, which is: "It's not a miracle that people survived, it's the result of people working hard." I briefly thought "I should mention this in an article" and then decided not to as I had something else I was working on. The following day, I noticed people tweeting what I thought was Patrick's article quite and bit, and I decided that it was worthy of mention. Except that it wasn't Patrick's, it was Alan Levin's USAToday article. My purpose was not to retell the story, but to praise the author for saying what so desperately needed to be said. And my first draft of the article was simply that – a brief retelling of the story followed by praise of Alan Levin for writing it.

While look for a YouTube'd newscast of the crash, I found the Nightline video, which made the same basic points that were in the Levin article, but with commentary that was really great to see. That rather messed up my story, so I changed it to be more inclusive and changed the title to "The Media Miracle." It was originally "The USAToday Miracle." And in fact, it was in the changes that my article began to look more like Patrick Smith's article.

So am I guilty of plagiarism? I don't think so, and Patrick certainly isn't claiming that I am. I didn't read his work completely, and I didn't look at it at all while I was writing my article. My original hypothesis of cryptonesia doesn't look accurate for many reasons, including the simplest one that the two article aren't really all that similar.

But I am guilty of changing the thrust my article and not doing the further research required to support this new thrust. If I had, I would have re-discovered Patrick's piece and included it. So, I apologize to Patrick Smith for not doing that and I thank him for bringing his article to my attention.

There is a post script to this story that bears mentioning. Patrick Smith and I exchanged a few more e-mails in which he asked where I went to high school. I told him St. John's Prep, in Danvers, MA. His reply: "I thought that was you."

It turns out that we were friends in high school, both graduating from the class of 1984. I didn't recognize his name because he changed it many years ago. He's the creator of the site AskThePilot.com, so we both have a connection to the travel industry even though this wasn't something we talked about in high school, and... we were both listening to the same obscure band (Human Sexual Response) last week.