Two journalists have accused the Daily Express of plagiarising their stories and publishing the copy under another reporter’s byline.
Daniel Puddicombe, a freelance journalist, said he is “livid” after his Telegraph feature on a coast-to-coast train in Mexico was was apparently copied by the Daily Express site. The piece is under another journalist’s name, and was published six days after The Telegraph.
Puddicombe said he is certain it is his work that has been lifted as he is “the first and only non-Mexican journalist who travelled on that railway line and to have been in contact with the military and the Navy”.
“There is absolutely no chance that anybody else could have done that,” he added.
He added another piece he wrote for the Telegraph about “Portugal’s Presidential Train” has also been “recycled” for the site, but it “at least references me and my original piece”. This second article did not appear to be written by AI, according to Pangram.
Both of Puddicombe’s articles lifted by the Daily Express were published on 18 October.
Puddicombe received an offer of £100 per article after reaching out to the Daily Express, which he declined and described as an “insult” as “less than one-third” of what he was paid per article.
Puddicombe was told by the Daily Express it could not offer beyond £100 per piece, and it “is never standard practice to pay the same rate as the original publisher”.
Puddicombe added there was “no real apology there or an explanation of how it happened”.
“I’m passionate about railways… and it’s a story I really wanted to tell,” Puddicombe said of his Telegraph feature. “It’s not a story that I wanted to do just to earn a bit of money… to spend three days doing it, and quite a lot of expense – £260 flight which I had to book with five days’ notice.”
Pangram finds Express copy to be AI-written
Press Gazette ran the Daily Express’s Mexico story through AI text-detector Pangram, which claims to be 99.98% accurate. The system said it had high confidence Puddicombe’s original Telegraph piece was human-written, and high confidence the Daily Express piece was written by AI.
In 2023, The Telegraph forbade staff from incorporating AI-generated text into copy except in limited circumstances, which require the sign-off of top Telegraph editors and the legal department.
Express publisher Reach uses AI to speed up rewriting articles so that they can be used multiple times on different sites. But Press Gazette understands that using AI tools to rewrite external copy goes against the Daily Express’s internal policy and is not an approved use.
“So add all of this together, and you can probably see where my frustration lies in the Daily Express have seemingly used an AI tool to scrape my articles and others and then to present it as their own,” Puddicombe said.
“It’s full of errors … the lead image doesn’t show the right train.
“My story’s got loads of colour because I was there. I spent three days talking to people and doing what journalists do. They remove all of that colour and then introduce a load of errors and then put it under somebody else’s name without any references to me. It’s just not fair.”
Puddicombe said he “absolutely” recommends journalists “Google either the headline or the link” of pieces they write to check if they have been copied. Puddicombe discovered the Daily Express write-ups with a Google Alert for his name.
Puddicombe added: “I’d read about the rise in AI and things like that in our industry…this is as much of a wakeup call to me as it is, hopefully, to the rest of industry about these practices, because it just felt really shocking that this can happen.
“Publishers, please don’t use AI to scrape other people’s articles and also pay people.”
‘Pattern’ of behaviour in the media
Another journalist, who asked not to be named, claimed the Daily Express lifted their piece and published it under someone else’s name.
“When you look at the content, it’s obviously pulled,” they said, adding there were “some kind of passages where I’m like, ‘that sounds exactly like what I wrote’.”
“So, I messaged my editor conact there, and they were like, ‘I can pass it on to legal’. But obviously this stuff happens.”
The piece was around “700 words”, referencing the journalist’s original work, but they were prompted to invoice the Daily Express by a journalist Facebook group. They were again offered £100 after reaching out, alongside a request for images.
Press Gazette has seen both the original and the copied version of the article (which does not appear to have been rewritten usingt AI).
The source added they believe this was requested so journalists don’t “kick off” about their work being lifted without permission. The journalist was told this is a “pattern” of behaviour in the media.
“Unless you’re searching your own pieces, you’re not going to flag it,” they added, noting this is why the Daily Express is “so quick” to offer payment when prompted.
“Obviously they know what they’re doing, and it will still be cheaper for them to pay out occasionally, then to actually pay people to do it properly and get original content,” they said.
Express response
A Daily Express spokesperson said: “We take this issue very seriously and regret that a small number of articles fell short of our high editorial standards for source use.
“These were isolated cases caused by human error, rather than the use of AI tools. We have offered appropriate payments to the external journalists and reinforced guidance across our teams to ensure it does not happen again.”
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