Free Press to Probe How Column Saw Print
With her newsroom angry over the lapse in judgment and other journalists around the nation taking pot shots at the paper and its star sports columnist, Detroit Free Press editor and publisher Carole Leigh Hutton announced an investigation of how the paper published a Mitch Albom column describing a game that had not yet taken place.
The column was also used in other media outlets, prompting apologies from both Tribune Media Services and Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, which each distributed the column.
“I’m furious we made such a ridiculous—I don’t even know what to call it—furious we could put something in the paper that couldn’t have happened,” Hutton said in the Detroit News.
“In his Sunday column, Albom described two former Michigan State University players attending the MSU-North Carolina game Saturday night. He described their behavior, what they wore and how they got there,” as Francis X. Donnelly recounted the events today in the Detroit News.
“But the players, Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, who had told Albom that they had planned to go to the game, changed their minds and did not attend.
“Because the column appeared in a section of the paper that was prepared before Saturday’s game, the incident also raised the issue of the role of editors, because the scene he described had not yet happened.
“Hutton, who planned to write a letter to readers, said the role of the editors would be examined during the investigation.”
The investigation is to be headed by Jeff Taylor, assistant managing editor for investigative reporting, John X. Miller, the reader representative, told Journal-isms.
Among the questions that have arisen are whether Albom has written columns that made similar assumptions and how the work in question got through so many editors.
The Detroit Free Press and competing Detroit News are under a joint operating agreement, in which the weekend papers are joint projects of both papers. The Knight Ridder-owned Free Press handles only news and sports on Saturday, while the Gannett-owned News does those sections on Sunday.
The Albom column went into the Sunday paper’s opinion section, called “Sunday” and published by the Free Press on Saturday morning for insertion into the Sunday paper. The Final Four game that Albom described did not begin until 6 p.m. Saturday, Eastern time.
The Sunday sports section, which is produced on deadline by the Detroit News, reported that Cleaves and Richardson did not show up at the game, revealing that Albom had fabricated the beginning of the column:
“In the audience Saturday at the Final Four, among the 46,000 hoop junkies, sales executives, movie producers, parents, contest winners, beer guzzlers, hip-hop stars and lucky locals who knew somebody who knew somebody, there were two former stars for Michigan State, Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson,” it began.
“They sat in the stands, in their MSU clothing, and rooted on their alma mater. They were teammates in the magical 2000 season, when the Spartans won it all. Both now play in the NBA, Richardson for Golden State, Cleaves for Seattle.”
“And both made it a point to fly in from wherever they were in their professional schedule just to sit together Saturday. Richardson, who earns millions, flew by private plane. Cleaves, who’s on his fourth team in five years, bought a ticket and flew commercial.”
Albom is the author of the current best-seller “Five People You Meet in Heaven” and of 1997’s “Tuesdays With Morrie,” about his conversations with his dying college mentor. It has since been made into a play, and is still on the best-seller list in paperback. When the Jayson Blair scandal broke at the New York Times in 2003, Albom strongly criticized both Blair and the Times, saying of the Times, “no matter what anyone tells you, that was about race,” and writing of Blair’s saga, “It’s not about closing the deal. It’s not about face time. It’s about—simply put—telling the truth.”
While Albom wrote a column Thursday apologizing to readers, attempts to minimize the issue infuriated some Free Press staff members. “It’s been called ‘a mistake’ all day and this is what has pissed people off,” one staff member told Journal-isms after a 45-minute staff meeting Thursday.
Albom took the same tack on his radio show, which reaches a national audience, and in television interviews.
Questioned on the 11 p.m. news on Detroit’s WDIV-TV, Albom said, “My first reaction was, ‘Oh God, Mitch, you listened to an athlete. What’s the matter with you? Ya know. You’ve done this for twenty years, and you believed what an athlete told you. Uh. So sure I was ‘oh, gosh’ and everything. Now, did it hurt anybody? Did it hurt them? No it didn’t. Did it . . . But it still wasn’t the right thing to do.”
“Mitch didn’t help his cause with the staff,” another staffer said. “He could have been contrite and he wasn’t. He could have been apologetic, and he wasn’t.” Some wondered at the staff meeting if a “star system” was in place that exempted Albom’s copy from scrutiny or Albom from punishment.
Hutton acknowledged to readers in 2003 that, “I refused to publish a freelance writer’s negative review of Free Press columnist Mitch Albom’s new book, ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven.’
“We heavily promote our association with him because we know how popular he is with so many of our readers. Somehow, using him to sell newspapers one day and publishing something hurtful about him the next felt dishonest and hypocritical,” Hutton wrote.
Despite critical discussion of the Albom case on at least two public journalism forums, sportsjournalists.com and the Romenesko letters page at the Poynter Institute, Free Press readers today were siding with Albom, Miller, the reader representative, told Journal-isms.
“Let’s not blow it out of proportion,” was one theme. “One mistake every 20 years isn’t bad,” a reader said.
“I’m not sure everybody read the column,” Miller said. “People come to his defense who may have heard him on radio or television. Like many columnists, people either love or hate him,” and could be reacting based on those emotions. “One of the things I’m discerning is that this situation is more complex that it first appears,” involving the production process, “credibility and integrity and truthfulness, and this falls in a gray area. To people whose life isn’t about credibility, it’s not a big deal.”
Miller compared the reaction to that involving the war in Iraq, where those who supported it based on false information continued to do so because they had already made up their minds. What some fail to realize, he said, is that we’re denigrating “the value of the journalism we do by putting suspect journalism in the newspaper.”
On the National Association of Black Journalists e-mail list today, some members clamored for the association to issue a statement. Suzette Martinez Standring, president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, wrote in the Romenesko letters column, “This is an egregious ethical lapse. Prophesying the future should be clearly labeled as such. Columnists do not fabricate events or characters and pawn them off as truth.”
But another journalism organization, the Associated Press Sports Editors, does not plan to become involved, president Jerry Micco, sports editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, told Journal-isms.
“It’s an internal matter for the Free Press and Mitch to work on,” Micco said.
However, Micco disputed the notion suggested by some in forums today that the Albom episode resulted from lower journalistic standards among sportswriters.
Most columnists don’t write assuming that things are going to happen, he said. “It has to actually happen.” While columnists might leave space in an article for the insertion of a final score or the like, the information is placed in the story when available, he said.
Albom has won “multiple APSE awards” and is widely respected, Micco said. “It’s a bruise; it’s not a break.”
Portrait of the Columnist as a Pampered Athlete (Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute)
From Failure to Professional Malpractice (Bob Steele, Poynter Institute)
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Rick Rodriguez, from Translator to ASNE President
Rick Rodriguez, executive editor of California’s Sacramento Bee, next week becomes president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the first Latino to hold the position.
On the Poynter Institute Web site, Gregory E. Favre asked Rodriguez how he got started.
“I was working at a Mexican grocery store that included a tortilla factory, when I went to work as a copy boy at the Salinas Californian,” he replied.
“I did take a 10-cent an hour pay cut. I had just graduated from high school, where I had been editor of the school paper for two years. I went to work at the Californian at a time when Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union were beginning to organize in the fields. I went out to the front lines, first to translate, then I fairly quickly started writing stories. I had a ringside seat to history, and coupled with the fact that I loved to read and write, I was hooked on the profession. What really sealed the deal was the support I got from a series of mentors throughout my career, great journalists and people who respected my work and made me want to reach higher.”
As to how newspapers are doing on improving their diversity record, he said:
“The industry is just doing OK. We’ve obviously made strides over the past 20 years, but we have a long way to go. It takes work to bring diversity to a newsroom because it’s a combination of recruiting, nurturing and retaining. Attracting journalists of color will be difficult for years to come partly because I don’t see a lot of serious commitment from many companies and partly because not enough students of color are going to college, let alone selecting print journalism as their majors or career choices.
“In California, for example, a new report shows that about half of Latino and African American male students don’t graduate from high school. Right there you’re starting with a vastly limited pool of potential journalists. ASNE can act as a bully pulpit, and it has been a leader in extolling the virtues of diversity. But the real movement has to come from individual companies and newsrooms. Success in diversifying a newsroom really takes commitment from the top. Without it, it won’t take hold.”
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Broadcasters Earn Peabodys for Africa Coverage
Peabody awards announced Thursday honored 32 programs as the best in electronic media for 2004. They included programs on the Darfur crisis, a public radio series on the history of rhythm ‘n’ blues, and the first award for the Univision network.
Others awardees were TRIO, a digital cable network, for “The N-Word,” which traced the history of racial dialogue through the use of one inflammatory word; and South Africa’s ” ‘Takalani Sesame Presents’ talk to me . . . ,” a one-hour South African Broadcasting Corporation documentary created by Sesame Workshop and the Kwasukasukela production company to promote communication between adults and children on HIV-AIDS.
Additionally, BBC Television News for “The Darfur Crisis” and the History Channel’s “Rwanda—Do the Scars Ever Fade?” “an episode of the ‘Time Machine’ series (produced by Bill Brummel Productions), which through first-person accounts asks the question of how an entire nation and culture can recover from the terrors of its past.”
Also honored were “The Suffering of Sudan,” from Channel One News for school-aged children; and Public Radio International’s “Let the Good Times Roll,” a 13-part series on rhythm ‘n’ blues that Journal-isms endorsed at the time.
Univision won for its public service campaign “Saluid es Vida . . . Enterate! (Lead a Healthy Life . . . Get the Facts!).”
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Dino Chiecchi to Edit Paper’s Bilingual Weekly
“El Paso native Dino Chiecchi has been named editor of Hispanic Publications for the San Antonio Express-News,” the El Paso Times reported Thursday.
“Chiecchi will oversee Conexión, the Express-News’ weekly bilingual publication. Chiecchi, who first joined the Express-News in 1986, returns to San Antonio after spending five years as an editor at the Associated Press bureau in Dallas.
“He is a former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and former president of Unity: Journalists of Color, a consortium of four minority journalist organizations.”
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Detroit’s Huel Perkins, Catalyst for Chess Team
“Twenty-six elementary and middle school students at Duffield School will compete nationally in chess for the first time,” Cassandra Spratling reported Wednesday in the Detroit Free Press.
“Their math teacher,” Kevin Fite, “got them in the game.
“But Coach Fite, as many of them call him, almost didn’t make it to the head of their classes.
“A chance meeting with WJBK-TV (Channel 2) anchorman Huel Perkins put Fite on a path that led him back to college and into teaching.
“It started in 1990, when Fite was 22 and working behind the meat counter at Meijer in Royal Oak.”
It turns out that Fite had watched Perkins on the air while Fite attended Southern University at Baton Rouge, La. Fite had “dropped out a year later after he ran out of money for tuition and living expenses, and a high school back injury killed his hopes of winning a football scholarship.”
And Perkins, it seems had a special reason for prodding Fite to return to Southern, as Spratling continued.
“I’m the son of Huel D. Perkins,” Perkins said. “My father taught for 25 years at Southern. I saw him mentor and help hundreds of children. Our whole family has a tradition of trying to get African-American children to go to college.”
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Short Takes
- The Committee to Protect Journalists Thursday condemned the attack on Mexican crime reporter Dolores Guadalupe García Escamilla, who was in critical condition after being shot repeatedly in front of her radio station in Nuevo Laredo, a city on the Texas border beset by a wave of drug-related violence.
- The North Star Network Web site went offline Wednesday and will reappear in about 20 days with an increased video and audio presence, CEO Walter Fields told Journal-isms today. The site, launched about two years ago, has attracted 70,000 unique visitors monthly but was originally conceived to be “like C-SPAN in terms of public affairs,” said Fields, formerly New Jersey NAACP political director.
- Rutgers-Newark officials apologized to the campus newspaper after an African American law school employee threw away copies of the weekly because she objected to a front-page headline that used the N-word, New Jersey’s Newark Star-Ledger reported.
- “The Republican and Democratic National committees each spent more than $30 million on advertising and other media-related expenses leading up to the November presidential election. In both instances, however, the proportion they spent with the Black media appears to be less than half of their respective Black base,” Hazel Trice Edney reported for the National Newspaper Publishers Association.
- Tiffani Yamamoto has been promoted from news editor to assistant managing editor/presentation at California’s Visalia Times-Delta, the Gannett Co. said.
- “Four insiders at WLS-Channel 7 are vying to succeed Joel Daly as anchor of the Disney/ABC-owned station’s top-rated 4 p.m. weekday newscast,” Robert Feder reported Tuesday in the Chicago Sun-Times: 6 p.m. news anchor Alan Krashesky, 11 a.m. news anchor Sylvia Perez, morning news anchor Hosea Sanders and weekend news anchor Rob Johnson.
- “The managing editor of the Nairobi-based East African Standard’s Sunday edition was acquitted of criminal charges yesterday,” the Committee to Protect Journalists reported Tuesday. David Makali had been charged with stealing a police videotape that contained confessions that were published in the paper.
- Curtis Vogel‘s wife, TV reporter Kyung Lah, was fired by KNBC in Los Angeles for having an affair with producer Jeff Soto, who was also fired, along with 11 p.m. news producer Jim Bunner, who is said to have failed to alert management to the affair. Vogel now defends all three in a letter to Ron Fineman’s subscription-only newsletter that was picked up last week by the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column.
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