That headline needs some frantic newsflash theme music with typewriter strikes in the background. Lizzie Skurnick, proprietor of the Old Hag blog, used to work as a ghost writer for the same company that put out young Ms. Kaavya Viswanathan’s YA book. She offers some interesting insights into how YA series titles are produced there in a factory farming-like atmosphere. Further, the way books are edited leaves some doubt as to whether Viswanathan wrote the book herself. This would explain her surprise at some of the nicked passages.

But what exactly does 17th Street do? In light of the plagiarism scandal, this question has taken on new importance. Alloy Entertainment’s president, Leslie Morgenstein, told the Crimson that, “as has been previously reported, we helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book.” But it’s not clear where it was ever “reported” that the company “helped Kaavya…plot the book.” The first and most substantive public references to 17th Street’s role in the creation of Opal Mehta came in a February 22 article in the Boston Globe. There, writer David Mehegan said that the company “proposed that Viswanathan put her mind to something lighter, something closer to her own background” than her original writing samples. Based on a “fun, chatty e-mail” that Viswanathan wrote about herself, the “voice and idea for Opal” emerged, Viswanathan told the Globe. But her language makes it impossible to know who actually came up with the “voice and idea” — her or 17th Street.
…
For her part, Skurnick thinks that the realities of the market, but not any malicious plagiarism on Viswanathan’s part, may account for the similarities with Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. “They seem like very brief and stupid phrases to copy,” Skurnick said after reading the passages in question. “I’m sure the same phrases are in like 20 teen novels…I think in the case of teen fiction, obviously there are stock characters, there’s a stock plot often, there’s sort of these stock areas — the boy, the body, the family, the friend.”

In further developments, Random House has rejected Viswanathan’s apology. You’d think they’d lie a little lower after the whole Dan Brown thing. But you’d be wrong. (First link from Maud)

UPDATE: People on the street react!