Sulzberger: Assume You Have a Blair or Kelley in Your Newsroom

By: Joe Strupp Newspaper editors should assume that they have a Jayson Blair or Jack Kelley-type scofflaw in their newsrooms, New York Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. told attendees Thursday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) conference. Working under that assumption, they should proceed with efforts to strengthen controls on plagiarism and ethical lapses.

"Go back to your newspaper with the assumption that someone in your newsroom is doing these things," Sulzberger said during a panel discussion on ethics that included several leading editors and newspaper executives. "Run the drill, get ahead of the curve. Why wait for the kind of explosion that rocked The New York Times and USA Today? Until your newspaper grapples with it individually, [improvements are] probably not going to stick."

Sulzberger's comments came just hours after USA Today published excerpts from its long-awaited report on Kelley's miscues, which indicated that the paper's newsroom structure was, in part, to blame for Kelley's years of deception.

Other panelists agreed that newspapers must actively review their procedures. "Anyone who says this will not happen in their newsroom is not seeing it clearly," said Jack Fuller, president of Tribune Publishing, Chicago. "There is a tremendous role for quantitative analysis."

The panelists, led in the discussion by Michael Josephson of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles, also addressed the need for newspapers to more carefully review job applicants, with several criticizing editors who do not honestly respond to reference checks from those seeking to hire their former employees.

"It is hard to get people to tell you the truth about folks," said Greg Moore, editor of The Denver Post. "They give you hints, but need to be honest. If we have a bad apple somewhere, we should not just get them out of our newsroom, but let others know about them."

But Tony Ridder, CEO of Knight Ridder, and John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, warned that comments about former employees must be made with an eye toward legal aspects, such as potential slander allegations. "If someone calls our human resources department, they will get name, rank and serial number," Carroll said. "If they call me, they will get a very candid assessment, unless litigation is in the offing -- then they will get a lot of clearing of throats."

Ridder said editors can protect themselves by stating clear, honest facts about a former employee's work. "Tell the truth, so long as it is the stated reason in the termination notice," Ridder said. "That is the safest way to deal with it."

When asked by Josephson about a potential system that would require new hires to sign a waiver for the release of information, similar to those used in police departments, to help ease their reluctance to give up too much about an employee, the panelists were mixed. "I think it is a very good idea," said Fuller. "A very interesting idea." But others, such as Ridder, declared that a waiver only protects the paper if it is telling the truth.

When Josephson asked the audience of several hundred if they believed that they would get an accurate account of why someone was terminated from another job, only two or three people raised their hands.

The panelists then focused on the role of fellow newspaper employees in turning in their colleagues who commit ethical crimes. Several participants, citing instances in both the Kelley and Blair sagas of warnings from within the paper being ignored, urged editors to give more credence to internal complaints.

"Many of the people who fabricated or plagiarized are known among colleagues as bad actors," said Carroll. "When something goes wrong and someone is cutting corners, it is the duty of the colleague to run, not walk, to an editor to tell them." Several panelists urged newspapers to conduct more audits of stories, including matching expense reimbursements with stories to make sure reporters were at the locations they claimed to be.

"You have to have a culture where the contrarians can come forward, and not just be considered whiners," Moore said. "We also have to make sure we try to develop people, not just punish them."

When asked by Josephson to grade their paper's or newspaper group's overall performance in public service, ethics and maintaining quality, each panelist offered a C or C-plus, except for Fuller, who gave Tribune's 12 dailies a B-plus, and Sulzberger, who declined to issue a grade.

"I think it is a very mixed bag, you don't always have enough resources," said Carroll. "It's a struggle to get the (paper) out and public service is almost out of the question." Moore echoed that view, declaring, "We don't have the resources to do the job we can."

But several of the corporate executives disagreed. "You need to fix the system," Sulzberger responded. "We could add 100 new reporters to The New York Times; you still need to fix the flaws. It is no just a question of adding bodies."

Sulzberger also revealed that the worst thing to come out of the Blair scandal was not the former reporter's ethical crimes, but the fact that sources and readers who knew about the incorrect reporting did not complain because they believed that that was what newspapers did. "That is scary," he said.