CURRENTS
More Trouble at The Times
Rick Bragg Suspended
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| In late May, reporter Rick Bragg resigned from the Times. |
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."
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