By: Joe Strupp Managing Editor George Rodrigue of the Dallas Morning News apologized to readers in a blog posting that said the paper should not have let a reporter who is married to a pilot write a pilots union story.
"One of the canons of our ethical code is avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest," he wrote. "This week, we blew it."
Rodrigue went on to explain that Katie Fairbank, whom he termed "among our newsroom?s finest reporters" is married to an American Airlines pilot.
"? we tried to take advantage of her aviation expertise on stories where she often could make big contributions without getting into a conflict of interest," he added, "This week, we got into a coverage jam and wanted once again to take full advantage of her skills. In doing so, we put Katie in an unfair position."
Rodrigue explained that, on Tuesday, the paper learned about a pilot salary issue that was heating up and, with three business reporters unavailable, chose to use Fairbank.
"There was a wire story available to us, but it wasn?t clear or detailed enough for us to publish it," he wrote. "And it would have taken the other reporters on our business staff quite awhile to learn enough to write the story well."
Eventually, a Fairbank story on the issue ran in Wednesday's paper and on the Web site.
"We never should have put her in a position of either saying 'no' to an editor or of writing a story that posed a conflict of interest," Rodrigue wrote, later adding, "We shouldn?t have put Katie in that position back then, and we won?t do it in the future. Apologies from here for the mistake."
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