A guide to upcoming concerts and music releases published by the arts and lifestyle website Brightest Young Things contains several items that one of the site’s editors lifted from other publications, including Interview, Rolling Stone, and Wikipedia, and ran under his own name.

Logan Donaldson, BYT’s managing editor, was the principal author of the 13,000-word compendium, which highlights the site’s musical picks for the spring and summer seasons. But, as Washington City Paper reports, many entries originally attributed to Donaldson have been scrubbed of his name and replaced with the publications in which they originally appeared. The plagiarism was spotted by Emily White, a former NPR Music intern, who noticed something off about a blurb credited to Donaldson about the surf rock band Wavves. Several sentences were identical to a 2009 article about the band in Interview, which White noted in a tweet.

Following on White’s lead, her friend, Marissa Cetin, picked out a few other sentences attributed to Donaldson and found they were identical to passages that were previously published by The Telegraph of London, The Believer, and XLR8R.

Donaldson did not respond to an interview request. It appears that shortly after White’s initial criticism, the BYT music guide was cleaned up to give proper attribution on the items originally credited to Donaldson. However, the guide is a collaborative work by Donaldson and eight other BYT’s contributors, who were all able to submit listings under their own bylines. There is also a fair amount of original work by Donaldson himself, but the fact that much of his copy was plagiarized distracts from that effort.

That distresses BYT founder Svetlana Legetic, who says in an interview that the site’s seasonal guides are colossal efforts that require a tremendous amount of work from one or more of BYT’s two full-time staff. And compiling more than 100 paragraphs about upcoming albums and concerts requires culling through scads of press releases and other promotional copy.

“There’s absolutely no excuses, for this,” Legetic, who is also credited as one of the guide’s authors, says. “It’s a ginormous article. He was the one saddled with the music guide. We obviously don’t copy and paste from press releases. But you run out of ways to describe a new band and it gets to be 2 a.m.”

In this case, it would seem that Donaldson elected to copy and paste from already published works. The other contributors on the guide, who Legetic says had weeks of lead time, appear to have come up with their own language, or at least were able to parse through press releases.

Still, Legetic says she intends to keep Donaldson in place on BYT’s two-person editorial staff. “I’m not going to let him go,” she says. “He produces a lot of great original content. I’m not going to have him resign.”

But she adds that BYT isn’t really equipped to safeguard against instances like this. “We don’t have the system in place to check every sentence in a 13,000-word article,” she says. “It’s kind of an honor system, and it failed. Questions will obviously now be asked.”

Legetic says she feels “horrible” about the situation, and that Donaldson’s plagiarism will only distract from what she says is an otherwise exhaustive guide to upcoming musical events.

“The purpose was for it to be a useful tool,” she says. “Such is life.”

Clarification: Much of Donaldson’s plagiarism was discovered by Marissa Cetin, a student journalist at American University.