Former Editor of N.C. Paper that Ran Phony Quotes Explains Himself

By: Lesley Messer Jeff Sykes, now former editor of The Reidsville (N.C.) Review, knows that allowing false information in a newspaper is wrong -- and he regrets committing a breach in ethics. But he claims he never tried to justify or play down the seriousness of the situation.

"I'm not going to try to rationalize or defend what I did because I made a mistake," Sykes told E&P Friday. "I wasn't trying to hide anything. I was just trying to put out a good newspaper."

Sykes and two reporters resigned Thursday amid reports of a scandal involving faked names, photographs, and quotes in an item called "Two Cents Worth" that appears on the front page of the North Carolina daily. In the feature, interview subjects respond to a question and their answers are published alongside their names and photos.

In May, the item featured several people who do not live in Reidsville and did not respond as reported. After the scandal erupted in the national media over the past week, Media General Inc., the paper's parent company, launched an investigation that led to the resignation of Sykes and reporters Brook R. Corwin and Michael Pucci.

Before it became known that the paper had run the phony quotes, Sykes said Corwin and Pucci had come clean to him in private about what they had done. When Corwin and Pucci confessed, Sykes says, "I was just dumbfounded and that point. I was in shock. I think I said, 'You guys are killing me.' [One of the reporters] told me, 'This is not who I am. This doesn't represent what I believe in. I know I messed up. I'm sorry.' And at that point he asked for a second chance. And I took the easy road out.

"I asked them clearly, 'Are there any other ethical breaches you've made?' and they both swore absolutely not," he said. "I believe that to this day."

Sykes added, "I think it it's important that people understand that I was trying to hide anything. I was trying to give two really hardworking and talented reporters a second chance and not ruin their lives. And now I'm the one paying the price.

"When I made the decision that they deserved a second chance, I didn't think about the fact that this would spread across the globe in the blink of an eye and that I would be scrutinized a la Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass."

Sykes says he felt "Two Cents Worth" was more of an advertising product than editorial content, as it is sponsored by an insurance company. He adds that with such a small staff of reporters (five in all) at his disposal, coming up with content for it each day was "busy work" that few staffers wanted to tackle in addition to their regular duties.

He lamented the pressures of being the editor of three papers -- the daily Reidsville Review and The Eden (N.C.) Daily News, as well as the biweekly Madison (N.C.) Messenger. "I want people to know what editors in small markets are feeling: pressures to enhance readership, maintain credibility, and sell papers," he said. He knew that firing the two reporters would cut him down to only three reporters at the Review.

"I thought, 'If I fired these boys right now, we'll be back to square one.' Two out of 5, you do the math. And they were both my government reporters. So that means I would be left with a feature side and no news side."

Now that news of the paper's ethical breach has spread across the Internet, he says, "I'm being made out to be a buffoon or an idiot by people who live in Miami or D.C. or the glass towers in New York. I'm trying to run a paper in Reidsville, North Carolina."

And part of running the paper meant having faith in his reporters, which Sykes maintains he did until the end.

"I think we put [Corwin and Pucci] in a bad spot to make a bad decision. And I take the failure for that as their manager," he said. "These guys were excellent reporters. They worked really hard."