Cape Cod Times says reporter fabricated people for stories

Didn't someone else fabricate an Opening Day story in real life?

 

This is amazing. This went on 14 years, and likely more, without anyone noticing anything fishy? It sounds like to me the editors weren't doing their jobs either. But, to be fair, the reporter is the guilty party here and she got what she deserved.

I have NEVER made up a source. Wouldn't even think of or consider it, either. My work means way too much to me to ever cross that line.

It's kind of sad. I guess it happens a lot as Mizzou says, and that makes me feel worse.

I'll go back to living in my idealistic world now.

 

What's sad is I get why editors look the other way. They don't want to admit that something like this could happen under their watch. It could cost them their job. I know a copy editor who caught a writer doing it. The same writer had quoted the same "person" in a fan reaction story in two different sports. The same editor looked up the last 10 "fans" who this writer had quoted and there were no listings for any of them locally, in the white pages or on the internet.

I asked him if he was going to tell any of the higher-ups about it and he said, "While I don't have a shred of respect for that writer, I don't want him getting fired to be on my conscience."

I get that too... That happened about 15 years ago and that writer is still at that paper.

The thing about Shattered Glass is that he was caught by accident. If that guy doesn't get a bug up his butt about missing something on a certain story, Glass could have gone on for years doing the same thing.

 

i've turned in a couple real pieces of shit in my life because, for some reason or another, somebody has gotten away from me ... mostly when i was younger.

but then again, it's different in sports. we can't make people up, and if we embellish quotes, we have to go back and look that person in the eye the next day.

 

One thing about this woman's stories. They were local color evergreens (Falmouth Road Race, Veteran's Day parades, crowded day at local beaches, etc.) where the people quoted may have been assumed to be real, but weren't public figures, just plain folks. This means editors of those stories were extremely likely to take the quotes at face value (who'd fake quotes from the beach?) and more importantly, there'd be no blowback. People AT these events were going to assume the quotes were real.

 

Better boring and true than colorful and false. Sometimes, the story doesn't lend itself to artfulness. Making up quotes is the height of laziness.

Those editors were definitely asleep at the switch. Not a big place, something should've been amiss. Our ME here has been here decades, grew up here and knows everyone in town. I'm surprised this wasn't caught sooner.

It's people like this that are dragging down our business. And I agree with what's been said: This happens more than we like to think.

 

At my first job, we had a few big-time writers who were suspected of doing it all the time... One was sort of caught and got his hand slapped, but wasn't suspended.

At my second spot, a friend at another paper caught (but never confronted) his columnist doing it. The four writers in question would all be considered big-time by any standards today...

I have a friend at one of the major web sites who swears that one of their main columnists does it all the time.

It's fucking sickening...

 

Having edited and written parade, celebration, holiday stories like this before, many times, I disagree that this an "editor asleep at the wheel" problem. I don't work at the Cape Cod Times, but I did begin my long newspaper career as a stringer there covering Cape Cod Baseball League games.

It was mentioned that this is a small place. Well, it really isn't. Cape Cod is a tourist destination drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. A Fourth of July parade or some other public event will draw the locals, but also tons of people from California, Maine, New Hampshire, Quebec. It'd be really difficult for an editor to check any of those names and places, even with internet, and very easy for a reporter to make up such things. If the person doesn't exist in the first place, there won't even be any complaints coming to the editor or ombudsman about being misquoted. In a typical small town with a small town parade, it stands to reason that maybe a long-time editor with great local knowledge would know just about every name. But not in a tourist place like this. As an editor, you have to trust the writer. And as a writer, I need the editor to put trust in me.

Obviously, that trust was taken advantage of here. And if I was an editor who had handled any of this reporter's copy, I'd be really pissed right about now.

 

PBowker is right. The CC Times covers a large geographic area involving 15 or 16 different towns, one of which, Hyannis, has a fairly large population all by itself. If an editor lives in, say, Falmouth (paper's offices are in Hyannis), his personal knowledge of Truro could be as limited as my knowledge of central Mississippi.

 

That's very true. I guess it was just somewhat surprising to me that she could write a story about say, the Cotuit parade, without someone in Cotuit pointing out that the central figure of the story didn't exist.

 

How can you point out someone doesn't exist? Because you don't know that person?

 

I forgot about the tourism angle there. In a place like that, I guess that makes checking out names that much tougher.

Point well made.

I agree that trust in a place like that is even more important than in a town like ours where we seemingly know everybody and such a fabrication would be a near impossibility.