API Audio - Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Douglas Clifton

API talked with Doug Clifton about the impact of the Jayson Blair affair on the New York Times and journalism as a whole on the day editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd resigned from the paper. Mr. Clifton is editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and was named 2003 Editor & Publisher Editor of the Year.

Going back a couple weeks, what was your reaction when you first heard and did you reflect on your own newsroom's practices?

You know, obviously when the thing first emerged it was something of a shock and there was puzzlement as to what the extent of it was. Then the Times went ahead and detailed enormously the extent of the problem, and in a way it was a blueprint for any observer in a newsroom to say, "Well, gosh, how do we stack up against those kinds of things? Is there sufficient communication in my shop?"

So one of the first things that I did was to pull together our editorial leadership group and ask ourselves the question, "Well, could it happen here?" And honestly, we had to agree that while there are some substantial differences between a newspaper the size of the New York Times and mine, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, that yeah, it probably could happen there and it could happen probably anywhere. And so we tried to sort out the differences that were unique to the Times and came up with a kind of a review of what we do, how we communicate, whether we communicate as robustly as we should, because your question is on the mark here. Communication may well have been the key to the whole thing because it was clear that many people within the Times organization knew that they had something of a problem brewing in a particular person and that they didn't broadly share that information, they didn't robustly discuss the implications of that information, was maybe what lead to the ultimate problem.

What was your reaction to the resignations at the New York Times?

I must say that it's a total shock. I think that both men resigned is an indication that the New York Times takes this event enormously seriously. I don't think that there's any precedence for both the managing editor and the editor of a newspaper of that substance and position in the journalistic world to leave at the same time so I think what it does is to dramatize how important the New York Times believes this Jayson Blair event was. Do I think that it was the appropriate thing for them to resign? Do I think that it's "fair"? I'm still sorting that out. I'm not sure. I think that whatever internal examination they did of this sequence of events may well have led them to conclude that yes, someone at the top has got to fall on the sword. You know, I guess as an editor I'm a firm believer in that the editor is responsible for everything the organization does or fails to do. And this is the ultimate manifestation of that.

Do you think this incident might prompt a re-examination of the vetting process of who comes in the door to work at a newspaper?

Well, yea, and I think that a reexamination of that vetting process post-Janet Cook for the Washington Post. If you'll recall it developed that she didn't have the degrees that she said she did, didn't even go to the colleges that she said she did. And so newspapers routinely instituted screens to guard against that, and I think virtually ever newspaper these days requires people to sign waivers just so that they can check college backgrounds. I think that that will probably happen here as well. My only fear about this whole thing is that there will be so excessive a reaction to the Jayson Blair affair that we'll have the law of unintended consequences kick in. And what those consequences might be, I can't imagine or can't predict at the moment, but it sounds to me as though there's a possibility for an overreaction to occur.