THREE STAFFERS SUSPENDED AT SFGATE.com

By: Staff Reports Column Was 'Well Outside the Line'


Three staffers at SFGate.com were suspended on Tuesday for a
Morning Fix column - a daily e-mail reporting offbeat news
stories - that went beyond the site's standards, reports
The San Francisco Chronicle. SFGate is the Web portal for
the Chronicle and KRON-TV.

Writer Mark Morford, News Editor Vlae Kershner, and Features
Editor Amy Moon have been suspended for a week for their role in
what Robert Cauthorn, vice president of digital media for
theChronicle, described as "grotesquely outside the
standards that we have."

Morford, who pens the Morning Fix column daily for the Web site
and its 13,000 e-mail subscribers, elaborated on an Associated
Press story out of Philadelphia titled: "Female teacher accused
of sex with 13-year-old boy while friend watched."

Morford told the Chronicle that, "I wrote that from my own
experience as a teenage boy, we shouldn't jump on this as a bad
thing in every case. ... I would bet that most teenage boys in
this country would say that given the choice, this would be a
positive adventure for many of them..."

The column was posted online, but Cauthorn expressed his
objection to it before the e-mail version went out. The link to
Morning Fix was pulled from the home page and Cauthorn had the
offending column removed from the newspaper site's archives.

Cauthorn's only remark to the Chronicle was, "This was
well outside the line. When you operate on the edge, if you want
to be free and daring in your expression, you have to have a
commensurate level of responsibility."

Moon and Kershner were suspended without pay, while Morford, a
union member, will be paid during his suspension.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.