'USA Today'er: Outside Report 'Nailed It'

By: Mark Fitzgerald It was hard to find USA Today reporters willing to comment on Thursday's hard-hitting report on the fabrications and plagiarism of former star colleague Jack Kelley -- and its diagnosis of a "virus of fear" in the newsroom.

Chicago Bureau Chief Debbie Howlett said that even by late afternoon Thursday there seemed to be no e-mails buzzing back and forth among staffers, "as if they're afraid the e-mail will be read or something."

Howlett herself said she was impressed by the report from the veteran editors John Seigenthaler, a founding director of Gannett Co. Inc.'s national newspaper; Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists; and Bill Hilliard, retired editor of The Oregonian in Portland.

"I think they hit it right on the mark," Howlett said. "I didn't expect it to be that frank and blunt. ... They nailed it."

The report's long discussion of what it called the "fear factor" in the newsroom got most of the immediate attention, despite a detailed investigation into Kelley's misdeeds. In his last dozen years at the paper, the report said, Kelley fabricated parts of at least 20 stories, far more than the eight previously discovered. The investigation found he plagiarized at least 100 passages from other stories -- and occasionally embroidered even the plagiarism. He lifted an Associated Press quote from a Somalia woman originally described as holding a "frail child" in her arms. Kelley used the same quote, but wrote that the woman uttered the words "while running from machine-gun fire with a crying child in each arm."

It also added new allegations that Kelley claimed thousands of dollars in expense reimbursement for drivers and translators who now say they were never paid.

Focusing on the newsroom climate of fear is "somewhat appropriate because it gets to the heart of why Jack did what Jack did," Howlett said. In that regard, the report got even little details right, she said. It quotes some staffers as calling the News department, which was headed by Managing Editor/News Hal Ritter, "the House of Mean." When Ritter was in charge of the paper's Money section, some called the department "the house of pain," she said. Ritter tendered his resignation late Thursday.

The one disappointing aspect of the report, Howlett said, was that it "didn't address the resource issues, and how short-staffed the paper is, and what an incredible disadvantage it is at when a big story breaks, compared to The New York Times or The Washington Post."

The staffing level is particularly relevant to the Kelley affair, she said, given the paper's "expectations of what reporters can do and how quickly they can do it."