Journalist fighting to get her job back

A Dominion Post reporter is appealing against her dismissal for allegedly copying work from the Herald on Sunday.

Tanya Katterns was sacked after her employer, Fairfax Media, concluded she had plagiarised an article by columnist Deborah Coddington.

Katterns has launched a bid to get her job back but the Employment Relations Authority has declined her request to be allowed back to work until a final hearing on March 1.

According to an ERA document, Katterns' manager, Patrick Crewdson, was alerted to the issue after seeing a post by Coddington on Facebook.

The opening paragraph of Katterns' article about politician Ron Mark was similar to part of a piece by Coddington published two months earlier.

During email exchanges with her managers, Katterns denied she had read Coddington's article. However, a search of internet records revealed she had accessed the article before filing her piece. In disciplinary meetings, Katterns acknowledged reading the article, but said she had not realised it was by Coddington.

She said that any similarities between their work were inadvertent.

But Fairfax believed them to be so striking as to be intentional, and argued she had deliberately misled her managers when first confronted with the allegations.

Posts by Katterns on her Facebook page about her situation attracted comments from others criticising her employer. These were seen by her co-workers, but the ERA ruled they were not a factor in her dismissal.

Katterns argued that allowing her back to work would help ease the financial difficulty, loss of professional reputation, and ill-health that she claimed had resulted from her dismissal.

Yesterday, Katterns said the ruling was to be expected, but declined to comment on the hearing for permanent reinstatement.

The Dominion Post also declined to comment.