Maybe it was the perfect quote about the shallowness of city people that brought reporter Karen Jeffrey down. She’d been quoting imaginary people in stories for years, but somehow this particular Veteran’s Day story, with a self-searching vacationer, did her in.

The story’s about a Veteran’s Day parade, a boring assignment. In 31 years at the Cape Cod Times, Jeffrey had been assigned lots of dull tasks as well as more interesting ones. (For all

I know she did the dreaded What to Do with Your Old Christmas Tree story 30 times.)

But Jeffrey’s story provided a telling quote from Ronald Chipman about his family noticing a gathering of people with flags. “I looked at my wife. She looked back at me. We had the same guilty thought – Veterans Day – and we thought nothing about it except as a long weekend on the Cape until we saw that,’ said Chipman, 46, a Boston resident. ‘You live in the city and sometimes you forget about things like this – about things still mattering to people,’ he said.”

You shallow Bostonians, forgetting about things that matter, and people to whom they matter. You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things. If you were any shallower, you wouldn’t even exist.

And in fact, when Jeffrey’s editors decided to check the story out, they couldn’t find the Chipmans. Jeffrey said she couldn’t help, because she’d tossed her notes. The editors looked at who’d been quoted in some of her other stories. It seemed she’d quoted lots of imaginary people, in at least 34 stories since 1998, when the Times started keeping stories electronically. “The stories with suspect sourcing were typically lighter fare – a story on young voters, a story on getting ready for a hurricane, a story on the Red Sox home opener,” wrote the editor and the publisher in their apology. (Holiday tree disposal = lighter fare. Also? Parades.)

For publisher Peter Meyer and editor Paul Pronovost wrote and published a long, serious, detailed apology. They begin: “There is an implied contract between a newspaper and its readers. The paper prints the truth. Readers believe that it’s true. …[A] good newspaper holds nothing more sacred than its role to tell the truth. Always. As fully and as fairly as possible. This is our guiding principle, so it is with heavy heart that we tell you the Cape Cod Times has broken that trust.”

They give examples of Jeffrey stories with fake sources. They note the kinds of stories Jeffrey did with real sources – “police and court news, political stories …a series on returning war veterans.” They describe how they searched for Jeffrey’s sources. They say they examined stories by other reporters, and their sources checked out as good – you know, actually existing.

 

Meyer and Pronovost pose the question of how this could have happened. “Or more important, how did we allow this to happen? It’s a question we cannot satisfactorily answer. Clearly we placed too much trust in a reporter and did not verify sourcing with necessary frequency.” They accurately say “Reporters take this responsibility [of fairness and accuracy] to heart and when someone treats their work with anything less than the highest ethical standards, good journalists are heartbroken.”

In the future, they say they will be spot-checking stories randomly (I suggest special focus on parade coverage), and will have an ethics training session for their staff (which now that Jeffrey is gone, means everybody else, who didn’t make up sources).

“We also are in the process of removing Jeffrey’s questionable stories or passages of stories from capecodonline.com and will replace the suspect content with a note that explains why it was removed….

“This column is our first step toward addressing what we uncovered. We needed to share these details, as uncomfortable as they are, because we are more than a private company dealing with a personnel issue – we are a newspaper and we have broken our trust with you. We deeply regret this happened and extend our personal apology to you.”

It’s a fine apology. It explains fully, expresses remorse, takes responsibility, describes how they’re limiting the damage, and says what they’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Poynter.org agrees, but quibbles that they should have come clean faster. They began investigating November 12, when the Veterans’ Day story appeared, and didn’t publish the apology till December 4. On November 30, Jeffrey tweeted that she was leaving her job.

Maybe, but I’m willing to believe that there were reasons to move deliberately, to investigate further, to get more of an idea of how far the rot had spread. What if Jeffrey’s police stories were tainted? What if other reporters had been making up sources? Or what if the Chipman family suddenly turned up?

At this point, I am tempted to quote an expert who would opine on the Jeffrey situation. An imaginary expert, with a good name, like imaginary 88-year-old Johnson Coggins, quoted in a story Jeffrey wrote about a Fourth of July parade. (Another parade story! Augh!) I’d cite Professor Coggins, and his Coggins Test for when a quote is just too good. But no. Then I’d have to fire myself as Jeffrey was fired. What a shallow city-person idea that was.