WEB EXCLUSIVE
More Trouble At The Times:
Rick Bragg Suspended
BY GEOFFREY GRAY
Rick
Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times,
has been suspended for two weeks from writing for the paper, the
Columbia Journalism Review has learned. The news comes
after the Times published an Editors’ Note Friday
clarifying Bragg’s handling of a front-page feature story
last June in the small, oyster-shucking town of Apalachicola,
Florida.
Earlier in the week, a reader had written to the Times
expressing concern that Bragg had never been spotted in Apalachicola.
According to the Editors’ Note, and Bragg himself, it was
Bragg’s intern at the time, J. Wes Yoder, who did all the
on-site reporting and interviews for the piece. The note said
that the piece should have carried Yoder’s byline as well
as Bragg’s. The story, about the lives of oystermen on the
Florida Gulf Coast, had a you-are-there quality, as much of Bragg’s
work does. Catherine Mathis, a Times spokeswoman, declined
to comment on the suspension. "We do not discuss personnel
actions or matters," she said.
In an interview with CJR on Wednesday, Bragg said that
while Yoder was in Apalachicola, he was in the resort town of
Fort Walton Beach, only an hour or so away, doing additional reporting.
To justify the dateline for the story, Bragg drove into Apalachicola
for a couple of hours, returned to his hotel in Fort Walton, and
went over story notes with Yoder. Two days later, they both returned
to New Orleans, where Bragg lives, and where he typed up the story.
"I wouldn’t have done anything different," said
Bragg. "J. Wes did great work and we came out with a great
story."
While many national correspondents at the Times rely heavily
on stringers, the paper’s policy on "dateline integrity"
is that the bylined writer must "provide the bulk of the
information, in the form of copy or, when necessary, of notes
used faithfully in a rewrite." Had Yoder been given at least
partial credit, it seems, Bragg’s piece might not have had
any "dateline integrity" issues. The Times national
desk policy of not giving bylines to stringers or freelancers
is one of the areas a new committee — headed by assistant
managing editor Allan M. Siegal and formed in the wake of the
Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication debacle to rethink newsroom
policies — will review. "It
would have been nice for J. Wes to share a byline, or at least
a tagline, but that’s not the policy," Bragg said. "I
don’t make the policies."
In an interview, Yoder, who now works as a staff reporter at The
Anniston Star, the same paper where Bragg began his career,
said that he never expected to get a byline for the Apalachicola
piece. "This is what stringers do, the legwork," he
said. "I did most of the reporting and Rick wrote it. Nothing’s
inaccurate. Rick tried to bring the piece alive, to take the reader
there, and he did a darn good job of it."
Posted
May 23, 2003 at 5:30 p.m.
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Geoffrey
Gray is a free-lance writer based in New York. He has written for
The
New York Times, The New York Observer, The Nation,
and other publications.
