Christine Fossett
Life is full of judgment calls. Each day, we analyze both small and large issues, weigh our options and make a decision.
We hope to be right every time, but as humans, if we get most of it correct, we think we are doing pretty well.
That’s not true in journalism.
We’re asked be to right all the time, and we’re expected to step forward and explain ourselves when we’re not.
On June 28, The Columbian published a story by its government reporter, Katie Gillespie. A week later, a story on the same topic was published in The Reflector. The similarities in the stories, specifically in several paragraphs that read the same verbatim, are an example of a poor decision by a member of our staff.
Once The Reflector’s story was called into question, we spoke with the reporter, and then we thoroughly examined the documents, her notes and the sources she used to build her story.
The reporter denied intentionally copying the story, but it was clear to this newspaper’s leadership team that, purposeful or not, plagiarism occurred.
Deadlines for newspapers are a constant pressure. Many people would not cope with the pressure of that many blank pages at the start of the news cycle. Some days, the news just seems to happen, and other days, the struggle is real. The sources don’t return the phone calls you make to them, the public documents you need to verify your story aren’t ready, and you are still staring at those empty pages as the press deadline looms larger.
That’s no excuse to cut corners.
Newspaper journalism is different than other mediums. When we are working on a story, we are generally trying to get it to you as quickly as we can, online or in the printed product.
Therein lies some of the pressure, which we expect our reporters never to cave to.
Anyone can write a blog, a column or opinion piece. You can’t be wrong. It’s your opinion. There is no standard for checking your facts, or sourcing your quotes.
On the news pages, we support and require strong journalism skills. We aren’t perfect and we make mistakes. There are weeks with a typo here or there or a photo is missing the credit to the photographer. Usually they are very small and technical errors.
This incident is not that kind of error.
Newspapers and journalists should be held to a high standard of integrity. We believe this and live by this. We owe our readers solidly written and properly sourced stories without bias. The articles we write need to be ours, written entirely by us.
We need to stand behind them. When we cannot, when poor decisions are made, there are consequences.
The reporter’s employment with The Reflector was terminated effective July 11.
We will renew our editorial staff with additional reporters.
They will continue to provide our readers with quality journalism as The Reflector has for decades.
We acknowledge errors were made.
Steps will be taken to ensure it never happens again.
Christine Fossett
President, COO
