No Tears for USA Today
I haven't been following this USA Today dustup very closely, but I can tell you I'm not inclined to feel sorry for all the editors who are having to resign over the fraudulent Jack Kelley stories.

I can tell you that in every newsroom I've worked in - sometimes as soon as the first day -- you start to figure out which reporters and editors play loose with the facts. And it tends to be common knowledge among the reporters, desk editors, copy editors and even the photographers. Depending on how hands-on the managing editor and executive editors are -- and that's a decision they make for themselves -- they also will know which reporters to watch. Seldom is it a secret. You find out in a lot of ways. Sometimes there is another reporter or photographer at the same event, an editor finds a reporter who repeatedly can't back up his sweeping lead and has lots of holes in the stories, a copy editor calls a reporter to clarify a quote and it turns out that quote isn't quite in the reporter's notes. Sometimes a reporter's work is frequently contradicted by every other media outlet covering the story. More than once I've seen an editor deem a star reporter's work untouchable, and in one case that reporter was later caught and fired for making up quotes.

As for USA Today, if it's like most other newsrooms, (and like Jayson Blair and the New York Times) the top brass probably knew Kelley's work needed extra scrutiny. And if they didn't know, it was their own fault for distancing themselves from the grunts schlepping over his copy every day.

On a related note, Jeff Jarvis was in Washington D.C. yesterday and attended the ethics session at the meeting of the Association Society of Newspaper Editors. The session ended with a comment from Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times: "The scariest thing of all of last year for me... wasn't Jayson Blair.... The scariest part was that the people we lied about didn't bother to call because they just assumed that's the way newspapers worked. That's scary."
- posted by Amy @ 4/23/2004 12:27:00 PM