Publisher halts sales of disgraced writer Ross Barkan’s book on pal Mamdani amid plagiarism scandal
Media Publisher halts sales of disgraced writer Ross Barkan’s book on pal Mamdani amid plagiarism scandal By Alexandra Steigrad Published Aug. Add The New York Post on Google Penguin Random House has slammed the brakes on sales and promotions for a forthcoming book by journo Ross Barkan, who was recently fired from New York Magazine over dozens of instances of plagiarism. The tome praising Mayor Zohran Mamdani – who counted Barkan as one of his biggest fans in NYC journalism – had been set for an October release.
- ▪Media Publisher halts sales of disgraced writer Ross Barkan’s book on pal Mamdani amid plagiarism scandal By Alexandra Steigrad Published Aug.
- ▪Add The New York Post on Google Penguin Random House has slammed the brakes on sales and promotions for a forthcoming book by journo Ross Barkan, who was recently fired from New York Magazine over dozens of instances of plagiarism.
- ▪The tome praising Mayor Zohran Mamdani – who counted Barkan as one of his biggest fans in NYC journalism – had been set for an October release.
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Record
| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/08/18/media/publisher-halts-sales-of-disgraced-writer-ross-barkans-book-on-pal-mamdani-amid-plagiarism-scandal/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:12:19 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-18T22:34:06.312Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-18T22:34:06.312Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Media Publisher halts sales of disgraced writer Ross Barkan’s book on pal Mamdani amid plagiarism scandal By Alexandra Steigrad Published Aug. 18, 2026 Updated Aug. 18, 2026, 6:21 p.m. ET (function() { var overlay = document.getElementById("nyp-player-lcp-overlay"); if (!overlay) { return; } function hideOverlay() { overlay.remove(); } function afterDCL() { requestAnimationFrame(hideOverlay); } if (document.readyState === "loading") { document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", afterDCL, { once: true }); } else { afterDCL(); } })(); See more of our coverage in your search results.
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