We’ve mentioned that attempts at explanation can screw up apologies. Explaining what happened can all too often veer into self-justification and victim-blaming. It’s better to focus on telling the person you’re apologizing to that you understand why what you did was wrong (and STATE WHAT YOU DID rather than calling it “what happened” or skipping right to the “sorry” part), that you understand the impact of your screw-up, that you are truly sorry, and that you are attempting to make things right (through reparations or through putting systems in place to ensure that this never happens again).

Bad apologies make Tom Hiddleston sad

But here is a good example of an explanation in an apology that doesn’t dilute the apology itself.

Daily News columnist Shaun King was accused of plagiarism (from articles in The Daily Beast and FiveThirtyEight) and it sure looked like he was guilty. GUILTY.

But King posted screenshots online of his emails to his editor, and in them, he had indeed attributed the disputed passages to their authors. When the stories appeared in print, though, the attribution had been stripped out.

(In a series of tweets, King — who is an avid and vocal Bernie Sanders supporter — blamed Chelsea Clinton and/or her acolytes, which was not his finest moment. Saying idiotic things when one is stressed is not unheard of, and Hillary Clinton seems to attract conspiracy theories the way Tom Hiddleston’s butt attracts people who would otherwise not watch a BBC miniseries.)

Oy, Shaun, no.

Hiiiiiiiii, I’m plotting against Shaun King right now!

Anyhoo, The Daily News soon issued a statement blaming King’s editor. They fired him without naming him.

Get out.

Yesterday, that editor outed himself. Jotham Sederstrom explained what had happened (he’d screwed up while putting King’s copy into the paper’s Content Management System, and he’d meant to go back in to include the two attributions but forgot). He says he’s sorry at the beginning and end of his statement, he takes full responsibility, and he apologizes specifically and by name to the journalists whose work he inadvertently lifted.

But in explaining what happened, he takes issue with the Daily News’s editor-in-chief’s statement that what had happened was utterly shocking.

In those two cases where no citation or hyperlink appeared in the column, I believe I likely cut attribution from the top of Shaun’s quoted text with the intention of pasting them back inside the block — only to get distracted with another of the many responsibilities I juggled as an editor. On any given day I was tasked with editing not only Shaun’s column but roughly 20 other news stories from five reporters, all of whom filed early and often. Add to that a whiplash-inducing crescendo of breaking news, a handful of administrative responsibilities and the chaos typical of most newsrooms, and it’s easier to fathom how frequently focus can snap from one second to the next.

This is not an excuse, but here I take issue with Jim Rich’s assertion that these mistakes were “inexplicable.” They can happen easily if you’re not paying extreme attention to detail at every moment. Many of us in the news industry are increasingly under pressure to deliver an ever higher volume of stories with ever fewer resources and let’s just say, that doesn’t help. I don’t say that to absolve myself of blame, but to illustrate how this happened with no intention on my part to damage Shaun’s reputation or the paper’s.

This veers close to an excuse, but I don’t think it actually gets there. Anyone who follows the media knows that the Daily News is now being run by a drastically smaller editorial staff. According to the New York Times, its circulation has gone from 2.4 million copies a day in 1947 to 300,000 today. Five years ago, that number was 525,000. This is bad. If part of an apology is making sure the error never happens again, firing Sederstrom is a great visual — an OPTIC, a GRAND GESTURE — but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. The paper, like most papers today, is understaffed. I hope the News (and every paper!) can one day figure out a working business model including the digital realm, and hire more editors so each one can focus more on every story they’re working on.

One way to insure that this happens is to support your local paper. Stop reading Huffington Post and aggregators who hand you other people’s hard reporting and editing work for free. I subscribed to the Daily News when they made a concerted effort to go hardcore, in-your-face liberal, with super sassypants covers. It felt like a Hail Mary pass, but I appreciated it. I got a huge kick out of the renewed snarky attitude, which was clearly aimed at social-media sharing. Also, on Facebook, my own editor-in-chief at Tablet guilted those of us who enjoyed and shared the covers on Twitter and FB without paying to support their creation. So now I do. And I am glad. The paper takes two minutes to read; I admire the gumption it shows; and I like helping the survival of an alternative to the heinous New York Post. (I also remember when The Daily News was the single best source of public school reporting in New York City, and I’d love for it to get back to those glory days of unglamorous, shoe-leather local journalism. Which it engaged in while the New York Times, when it deigned to cover public schools at all, essentially printed press releases from the Mayor and Board of Regents and dismissed the folks who opposed mayoral control of schools and a lessened emphasis on standardized testing as grumbly parents and/or teachers in the pockets of their union who cared more about protecting their jobs rather than educating children. Wow, that was an unwieldy sentence but I was in a rage and I’m going to leave it because am I getting paid to edit this? No.)