The arts and lifestyle website Brightest Young Things announced the resignation last night of Logan Donaldson, its managing editor who was found Tuesday to have plagiarized whole sections of a 13,000-word music guide from other publications. Since the plagiarism in the music guide was discovered, it was also revealed that Donaldson lifted content throughout his four-year history with BYT.

As a result of the further discoveries of Donaldson’s plagiarism, BYT took offline its entire archive prior to March 25, removing content dating far back as 2006, for an “internal audit.”

“I would say we asked him to resign, but it was a non-optional situation,” the site’s founder, Svetlana Legetic, says in an exclusive interview with DCist. “It was what had to be done. We weren’t aware of the scope of the situation.”

Legetic admits that her site’s content was taken down so that BYT could review it in-house. Since Emily White, a former NPR intern, and Marissa Cetin, a student journalist at American University, made the first notations of Donaldson’s plagiarism, others have found more examples in BYT posts attributed to him.

“We would rather audit ourselves than have third parties do it,” Legetic says. Donaldson’s clips will be the “first line of attack,” and other writers’ posts will be returned to the site in drips and drabs. Legetic says BYT will continue publishing while the audit is conducted.

Legetic could not give an estimate of how many posts feature Donaldson’s byline, but it is likely many hundreds. Donaldson started contributing to BYT in 2009, and was hired as one of two full-time editors a year ago this week. BYT, regularly publishes about 100 articles in a week, many of them attributed to or featuring contributions by Donaldson.

“I’m very confident this did not happen constantly,” Legetic says. “A big part of why he was hired was his voice and his ability to write and the content we have seen from him. A lot of this stuff is original. Not all of BYT is a disaster. We are wanting to parse through it and see.”

But so far, Donaldson has been found to have plagiarized content from Interview, Rolling Stone, XLR8R, The Telegraph, and even Wikipedia, just in the spring and summer music guide that BYT published Tuesday.

Although Donaldson’s work will be the focus of the audit, it affects the site’s other contributors, none of them who can currently see their work published before Tuesday. “We will be releasing stuff back onto the website as things get dealt with,” Legetic says, though it is unclear at what pace. “I don’t have a hard audit timeline. It is obviously in our interest to get our content back as soon as possible.”

A longtime BYT writer says Legetic called him ahead of making news of Donaldson’s dismissal and the audit public. Legetic says the decisions were discussed with BYT’s “core team.”

In the immediate aftermath of the discoveries of plagiarism in the music guide, Legetic stuck by Donaldson, saying that she had no plans to ask him to leave the company. That changed after additional examples were found of Donaldson copying whole passages of other publications. “We would have acted on it yesterday,” she says. “This is just what it is.”

Though most of BYT’s content is offline now, Legetic says she does not expect her site’s traffic to plummet. Most visitors to the site come for content posted in the most previous 48 hours, though many also click after specific searches for older content, which currently, they won’t be able to access.

“It is the necessary situation, she says. “I’m not going to wonder what it’s going to do to my traffic.”

With Donaldson’s departure, Legetic says she will be resuming a more active role in BYT’s daily editorial operations. She stepped back from that role last year when she hired Donaldson and the site’s assistant editor, Stephanie Breijo, in order to focus on expanding BYT’s cultural curation and party-throwing business to New York.

Legetic says the audit is BYT’s “No. 1 priority,” but it is going to take a while to scrutinize every word Donaldson, and possibly other writers, contributed over the years.

“It’s going to be prolonged,” she says. “Not something we have time to do but something that has to get done.”

Brightest Young Things is also releasing a public statement:

BYT has always had a deep commitment to original and creative content from day one and the discovery of plagiarism on our website has deeply affected us. As (proud) producers of original content on a daily basis, we feel for, and would like to publicly apologize to the writers whose work was used without proper attribution. That, as well as a responsibility to our readers and partners, has led us to take the following steps:

• The staff member responsible for this and possibly some other content mis-appropriations is no longer working with us, effective today, March 27th
• We have unpublished our archives prior to March 25th and are performing an exhaustive internal audit to ensure this is not a repeated occurrence, as well as putting in place the necessary systems that this does not repeat itself in the future.

As a start up, unfortunately this is a growing pain we didn’t anticipate. However, we look forward to learning from this in order to put forth better original content and keep our readers as entertained and informed and awesome-at-life as ever (if not more).