Small town newspapers rely on reporters' honesty
Friday, October 17, 2008
By: Hannah Pickett
With my job as a sports editor, I am in charge of two correspondents from two surrounding towns. These correspondents cover the sports in their town/school, email their pictures, stats, and stories to me, and have relatively no face to face contact with me.
Since we cover three schools, it is difficult for me to keep up with every sport at every school, which is why I rely heavily upon our correspondents from that particular school. This past summer, one of our correspondents' daughters was playing softball for a team that should have made it to state, but didn't.
About halfway into the season, I started to notice a trend while editing her stories. Every single story highlighted the game with her daughter doing something incredible. I found this a bit fishy, because her daughter had the type of athlete to make game-clinching plays for the win. Also, I had received quite a few emails saying that the game didn't actually pan out the way it was reported. So, I headed to one of the team's games the following week.
Our correspondent's daughter warmed the bench until the bottom of the sixth when she pinch hit. I talked to the coach after the game and he said this girl had seen action in two games this season. I confronted our correspondent about it and she started throwing a fit, denying everything.
The publisher, the editor, the correspondent, and myself had a conference call later to discuss the repercussions her choices had on the company. For the next few weeks, we printed retraction after retraction, and I had to double check every single claim she made in her article.
This goes to show the importance of reporting the facts straight. You wouldn't think that in a sports section you could get away with fibbing through a story, but in this case, she did for a few weeks. I felt like a complete idiot because a sports editor is supposed to catch this type of error, but I had no way of knowing. She even changed the stats to match her story. The score always matched up with the actual score, too.
We could have been slapped with so many lawsuits for libel because of her ulterior motive to put her kid in the spotlight. Not only did she make a fool of herself, but of me, the editor, the publisher, and the entire publication in general. Needless to say, she is no longer employed.
